Do we use social media—or does it use us?

That's one of the fundamental questions posed by artist Dave Cicirelli in a series of works produced in different media—including social media, in real time—over the past decade. He creates what he calls "experiential art" because the audience must interact with it rather than passively contemplate it in order to make sense of it. His signature works include:

• Fakebook: A True Story Based on Actual Lies, a memoir of a fabricated, increasingly unbelievable cross-country trip that Cicirelli documented in real time for his followers on Facebook;
• Fake Banksy Sells Out, a street sale of openly counterfeit paintings in Central Park;
• All Minus One, a graphic novel version of John Stuart Mill's ideas on free speech and social conformity done in collaboration with Jonathan Haidt and Richard V. Reeves; and
• The Infinity Cube, a mind-blowing, glass-and-mirrors immersive installation that challenges participants to deny their urge to take a selfie.

Born in 1983 and raised in New Jersey, Cicirelli studied art at Rutgers University, where 60 years ago Allan Kaprow and other members of the Fluxus movement pioneered art "happenings" that forced audience members both to participate in the creative process and to produce their own meanings. A longtime Reason reader who is skeptical of both government and corporate power, he is quite possibly the only artist alive who counts comic book legend Jack Kirby and politician Barry Goldwater among his inspirations.

Cicirelli's work forces us to contemplate: Why is there so much fakeness in a world that places so much value on authenticity and transparency? How do we maintain our individuality when social media algorithms group us into simplistic categories and tribes? And has technology become a substitute for reality rather than something we use to express our true selves?

Watch an abridged video version of this interview:

The post Dave Cicirelli: Does Selfie Culture Destroy Real Individualism? appeared first on Reason.com.

In the 1990s, Marc Andreessen helped make the World Wide Web navigable by co-authoring Mosaic, the first super-popular web browser, and then by co-founding Netscape, one of the first great internet initial public offerings (IPOs). As a founder of the venture capital powerhouse Andreessen Horowitz, he has had a central role in funding Facebook, Pinterest, LinkedIn, Twitter, Lyft, and other companies that define our age.

Unlike many of his peers, Andreessen is also a congenital optimist, who places his hope for the future squarely in the hands of what he once called "the 19-year-olds and the startups that no one's heard of." 

On this episode, Reason's Editor in Chief Katherine Mangu-Ward sat down with Andreessen to talk about what the future will look like and whether it's still going to emerge from Silicon Valley, the role of government in fostering or destroying innovation, and what you should read on your next beach vacation.

Today's sponsors:

• Lions of Liberty Podcast Network. Take your first step toward freedom by checking out one of the oldest libertarian/anarchist podcast networks in the world. On Mondays, John Odermatt delivers a powerful mix of inspiration, health, and faith to set your mind, body, and soul free with Finding Freedom. On Wednesdays, Brian McWilliams will make you laugh at our broken world while providing the promise of a better future with Mean Age Daydream. Friday's offerings include shows like Meme Wars, Hatewatch, and Libertarians in Living Rooms Drinking Liquor. Listen today at Lions of Liberty Network and everywhere podcasts are found. Past episodes featuring Nick Gillespie talking postmodernism and South Park and Rick and Morty are here and here.
• When you're at your best, you can do great things. But sometimes life gets you bogged down, and you may feel overwhelmed or like you're not showing up in the way that you want to. Working with a therapist can help you get closer to the best version of you. Because when you feel empowered, you're more prepared to take on everything life throws at you. If you're thinking of giving therapy a try, BetterHelp is a great option. It's convenient, flexible, affordable, and entirely online. Just fill out a brief questionnaire to get matched with a licensed therapist, and switch therapists anytime for no additional charge. If you want to live a more empowered life, therapy can get you there. Visit BetterHelp.com/TRI today to get 10 percent off your first month.

The post Marc Andreessen: What the World Needs Most Is More Elon Musks appeared first on Reason.com.

I'm the father of two adult sons who are thankfully out of the K-12 educational system. I say thankfully because I found education inherently anxiety-inducing. Turning your kids over to a school for years is no simple thing and my own ambivalent memories as a student didn't help.

I'm pretty sure it's always been this way, but today it just seems at a fever pitch of awfulness. There's growing (and ineffective) per-pupil spending; lack of meaningful choice for many, if not most, parents and students; a lack of transparency and accountability; the lingering effects of COVID-related lockdowns; the rise of highly politicized curricula about everything from critical race theory (CRT) to gender and sexual orientation; and a return to fights over library books.

Today's guest is Robert Pondiscio, an education expert with the American Enterprise Institute who wrote How the Other Half Learns, a fantastic book about Success Academy, a controversial and highly effective charter school system based in New York City (watch my 2019 interview with him about that). What's more, he actually taught in a low-income public school in the South Bronx.

Pondiscio is going to add another worry to our list of concerns: Schools aren't teaching kids to read in any meaningful way. He's a strong advocate for all forms of school choice and reform, but he says choice itself is simply not enough to help the lower-income kids who can most benefit from a really good education.

We talk about all that, plus wokeness and a ton of other related topics. Let's call this episode "Everything You Wanted To Know About What's Wrong With K-12 Education But Were Too Afraid To Ask." It first ran as a Reason livestream at YouTube (watch here) and is cohosted by my colleague Zach Weissmueller.

Today's sponsors:

• Lions of Liberty Podcast Network. Take your first step toward freedom by checking out one of the oldest libertarian/anarchist podcast networks in the world. On Mondays, John Odermatt delivers a powerful mix of inspiration, health, and faith to set your mind, body, and soul free with Finding Freedom. On Wednesdays, Brian McWilliams will make you laugh at our broken world while providing the promise of a better future with Mean Age Daydream. Friday's offerings include shows like Meme Wars, Hatewatch, and Libertarians in Living Rooms Drinking Liquor. Listen today at Lions of Liberty Network and everywhere podcasts are found. Past episodes featuring Nick Gillespie talking postmodernism and South Park and Rick and Morty are here and here.
• The Reason Speakeasy. The Reason Speakeasy is a live, monthly, unscripted conversation with outspoken defenders of free thinking and heterodoxy in an age of cancel culture and thought police. The next one takes place in New York City on Monday, February 6, with Nick Gillespie interviewing Reason contributor, UnHerd columnist, Feminine Chaos podcaster, and mystery writer Kat Rosenfield about celebrities caving to woke critics, cancel culture, and her new novel You Must Remember This. Doors open at 6 p.m. Tickets are $10 and include beer, wine, soft drinks, and appetizers. For more details and to buy tickets, go here now.

The post Robert Pondiscio: Why Our Kids Can't Read appeared first on Reason.com.

"Brown v. Board of Ed ultimately was never about black kids getting into a white school. It was always about ultimately a parent being able to decide where their children should attend school," Virginia Lt. Gov. Winsome Earle-Sears tells me in today's Reason Interview podcast. She is one of the driving forces behind a new bill that would create so-called backpack funding for kids in Virginia.

Parents would be allowed to use the state's portion of per pupil funding—somewhere between $4,000 and $6,000—at any public or private school, for tutoring, books, and other educational expenses. If the bill passes, Virginia would join eight other states with education savings accounts (ESAs) that accomplish similar goals.

Earle-Sears was born in Jamaica in 1964 and grew up in New York City before joining the Marines and eventually settling in Virginia, where she has served in the House of Delegates and on the Virginia Board of Education. She became lieutenant governor in 2021 on the same ticket as Republican Glenn Youngkin in an election in which controversies over critical race theory (CRT), school lockdowns, and other issues related to education played a significant role. 

On today's show, we talk about why school choice is her top priority, the ongoing controversy over her administration's proposed history standards that were rejected by the Virginia Department of Education, and the black experience in America over the past half-century.

Today's sponsors:

• Lions of Liberty Podcast Network. Take your first step toward freedom by checking out one of the oldest libertarian/anarchist podcast networks in the world. On Mondays, John Odermatt delivers a powerful mix of inspiration, health, and faith to set your mind, body, and soul free with Finding Freedom. On Wednesdays, Brian McWilliams will make you laugh at our broken world while providing the promise of a better future with Mean Age Daydream. Friday's offerings include shows like Meme Wars, Hatewatch, and Libertarians in Living Rooms Drinking Liquor. Listen today at Lions of Liberty Network and everywhere podcasts are found. Past episodes featuring Nick Gillespie talking postmodernism and South Park and Rick and Morty are here and here.
• The Reason Speakeasy. The Reason Speakeasy is a live, monthly, unscripted conversation with outspoken defenders of free thinking and heterodoxy in an age of cancel culture and thought police. The next one takes place in New York City on Monday, February 6, with Nick Gillespie interviewing Reason contributor, UnHerd columnist, Feminine Chaos podcaster, and mystery writer Kat Rosenfield about celebrities caving to woke critics, cancel culture, and her new novel You Must Remember This. Doors open at 6 p.m. Tickets are $10 and include beer, wine, soft drinks, and appetizers. For more details and to buy tickets, go here now.

The post Winsome Earle-Sears: School Choice 'Is New <i>Brown v. Board</i>' Fight appeared first on Reason.com.

Pessimism is everywhere these days, with a whopping 76 percent of Americans telling Gallup they are dissatisfied with the direction of the country. Some of that's understandable: COVID-19 has killed 1.1 million Americans, there's a major land war going on in Europe, the stock market has tanked, and the political scene is filled with fakers and liars whose grasp on reality seems tentative at best.

But Mark P. Mills, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute and an engineering faculty fellow at Northwestern University, makes a compelling case for optimism in The Cloud Revolution: How the Convergence of New Technologies Will Unleash the Next Economic Boom and A Roaring 2020s. Increasingly, microprocessors, materials, and machines are being tied together through cloud computing to deliver startling, steady, and mostly underappreciated gains that are vastly improving all of our lives.

The example of the iPhone, which debuted in 2007 and radically changed how we live, illustrates Mills' point. It basically utilized existing technologies but tied them together in novel ways. He says the same sorts of breakthroughs are happening all around us, creating innovation that is disruptive in the short term but ultimately positive, if we'll finally let go of centuries-old anxiety about change.

Today's sponsors:

• Lions of Liberty Podcast Network. Take your first step toward freedom by checking out one of the oldest libertarian/anarchist podcast networks in the world. On Mondays, John Odermatt delivers a powerful mix of inspiration, health, and faith to set your mind, body, and soul free with Finding Freedom. On Wednesdays, Brian McWilliams will make you laugh at our broken world while providing the promise of a better future with Mean Age Daydream. Friday's offerings include shows like Meme Wars, Hatewatch, and Libertarians in Living Rooms Drinking Liquor. Listen today at Lions of Liberty Network and everywhere podcasts are found. Past episodes featuring Nick Gillespie talking postmodernism and South Park and Rick and Morty are here and here.
• The Reason Speakeasy. The Reason Speakeasy is a live, monthly, unscripted conversation with outspoken defenders of free thinking and heterodoxy in an age of cancel culture and thought police. The next one takes place in New York City on Monday, February 6, with Nick Gillespie interviewing Reason contributor, UnHerd columnist, Feminine Chaos podcaster, and mystery writer Kat Rosenfield about celebrities caving to woke critics, cancel culture, and her new novel You Must Remember This. Doors open at 6 p.m. Tickets are $10 and include beer, wine, soft drinks, and appetizers. For more details and to buy tickets, go here now.

The post Mark P. Mills: Get Ready for the Roaring 2020s! appeared first on Reason.com.

With more states and localities legalizing what the government still calls "illicit" drugs, how should we rethink criminal penalties and treatment for people with substance abuse problems? What policy and cultural frameworks will allow all of us to make better use decisions, reduce harm to ourselves and others, and make sure people who need help can get it?

At the latest Reason Speakeasy—a monthly live event in New York City with outspoken defenders of free speech and heterodox thinking—Nick Gillespie talked with Andrew Tatarsky, the founder of the Center for Optimal Living and the author of Harm Reduction Psychotherapy: A New Treatment for Drug and Alcohol Problems, and Maia Szalavitz, the author of Undoing Drugs: How Harm Reduction Is Changing the Future of Drugs and Addiction [Right?] and Unbroken Brain: A Revolutionary New Way of Understanding Addiction.

Tatarsky is widely recognized as one of the trailblazing pioneers behind the "harm reduction" movement, which seeks to minimize negative consequences of drug use rather than eradicate it. Szalavitz's work (including her articles for Reason) has long explored the role of agency and compassion in understanding and treating addictive and self-destructive behavior, and she writes with the authority of a former heroin user.

The post Andrew Tatarsky and Maia Szalavitz: How 'Harm Reduction' Is Transforming Drug Policy appeared first on Reason.com.

No federal bureaucrat played a bigger role in 20th-century law enforcement than J. Edgar Hoover (1895–1972), who served as the head of the FBI and its predecessor agency for half a century.

Hoover oversaw crackdowns on everything from real and imagined communists in the first Red Scare of the 1920s and its sequel in the 1950s; staged high-profile shootouts with "public enemies" like John Dillinger and Babyface Nelson in the 1930s; surveilled Nazi and Axis sympathizers during World War II; infiltrated the Ku Klux Klan in the 1960s; and pursued extralegal operations against civil rights leaders and antiwar protesters in the 1960s.

His personal vendetta against Martin Luther King, Jr. led to one of the most shameful incidents in FBI history, when the bureau sent an anonymous letter to King shortly before he was to receive the Nobel Peace Prize, encouraging him to commit suicide or be exposed as a serial philanderer.

Hoover is the subject of Yale historian Beverly Gage's new biography, G-Man: J. Edgar Hoover and the Making of the American Century. Gage seeks to complicate and flesh out the life and legacy of Hoover, who is rightly notorious for often brushing aside constitutional limits on state power like so much police tape at a crime site. Yet she points out that he opposed the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II, undermined Sen. Joe McCarthy's overwrought anti-communist witch hunts, and refused to do political surveillance for Richard Nixon, inadvertently leading to the bungled Watergate break-ins and the 37th president's fall from grace.

Gage tells Reason that to understand Hoover in all his complexity—including his much-whispered-about personal relationship with his FBI colleague Clyde Tolson—is to understand the moral ambiguities of the country he served, as well as the promise and limits of constitutional government in an open society.

The post Beverly Gage: The Dark Truth About J. Edgar Hoover's FBI appeared first on Reason.com.

Thinking about putting together a great home cocktail bar? Just interested in this fascinating, highly expressive subculture? 

Guest host Peter Suderman, Reason's features editor, talks with Jacob Grier, a craft cocktail bartender and writer based in Portland, Oregon. Grier is a Reason contributor and the co-author, with Brett Adams, of the new book Raising the Bar: A Bottle-by-Bottle Guide to Mixing Masterful Cocktails at Home. 

Suderman speaks with Grier about the pleasures of making cocktails, the way the internet and the pandemic have changed home bartending, and what lessons alcohol Prohibition still has for public policy today.

Today's sponsor:

• The Reason Speakeasy. The Reason Speakeasy is a live, monthly, unscripted conversation with outspoken defenders of free thinking and heterodoxy in an age of cancel culture and thought police. The next one takes place in New York City on Wednesday, January 4, with Nick Gillespie interviewing psychologist Andrew Tatarsky and author Maia Szalavitz about "harm reduction" approaches to drug policy. Rather than seeking to prohibit all drug use, advocates of harm reduction call for policies that minimize negative consequences to individual users and society at large. Doors open at 6 p.m. Tickets are $10 and include beer, wine, soft drinks, and appetizers. For more details and to buy tickets, go here now.

The post Jacob Grier: Craft Cocktail Freedom and the Terrible Science Behind Vaping Bans appeared first on Reason.com.

"This universe is finite. Its resources, finite. If life is left unchecked, life will cease to exist." So declares the Marvel Comics supervillain Thanos near the end of Avengers: Infinity War, when he destroys half of humanity with the snap of his finger.

In Superabundance, Marian L. Tupy of the Cato Institute and Gale L. Pooley of Brigham Young University note that Thanos is simply channeling millennia-old critiques of progress and population growth. In the best-known version of this argument, the 19th-century economist Thomas Malthus contended that more people inevitably means famine and starvation. 

But Malthus—and Thanos—are wrong. The past 200 years have seen historically huge increases in the number of people living on planet Earth. Indeed, we've gone from 1 billion in 1800 to 8 billion in 2022, but we are flourishing more than ever before and living longer, more productive lives.

Tupy, who runs the website Human Progress, and Pooley, an economist, chart how the real prices of our most basic necessities—and most of our luxury goods—have declined over time and how free markets and human innovation mean that our planet is infinitely bountiful.

I think Superabundance is one of the most compelling—and uplifting books—in years. I think you will too.

Today's sponsor:

• The Reason Speakeasy. The Reason Speakeasy is a live, monthly, unscripted conversation with outspoken defenders of free thinking and heterodoxy in an age of cancel culture and thought police. The next one takes place in New York City on Wednesday, January 4, with Nick Gillespie interviewing psychologist Andrew Tatarsky and author Maia Szalavitz about "harm reduction" approaches to drug policy. Rather than seeking to prohibit all drug use, advocates of harm reduction call for policies that minimize negative consequences to individual users and society at large. Doors open at 6 p.m. Tickets are $10 and include beer, wine, soft drinks, and appetizers. For more details and to buy tickets, go here now.

The post Marian Tupy and Gale Pooley: More People Means More Wealth appeared first on Reason.com.

It might be the oldest profession, but prostitution and other forms of sex work are also among the most prohibited and regulated around the world. 

At the latest Reason Speakeasy—a monthly live event in New York City with outspoken defenders of free speech and heterodox thinking—I talked with Kaytlin Bailey, the founder and executive director of Old Pros, a sex worker rights group and the writer and performer of Whore's Eye View, a one-woman show about 10,000 years of prostitution, female emancipation, and sexual freedom.

Bailey and Old Pros seek not just to decriminalize sex work but to destigmatize it too, arguing that sex workers have not only provided a much-in-demand service but helped to push the boundaries of freedom and liberty.

The post Kaytlin Bailey: Time to Decriminalize—and Destigmatize!—Sex Work appeared first on Reason.com.

Has the Republican Party lost its mind—and its way—in its slavish devotion to Donald Trump, who insists that the 2020 election was stolen from him through extensive voter fraud?

That's the question that journalist Robert Draper investigates in his new book Weapons of Mass Delusion, which looks at rising Republican stars such as Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R–Ga.) and failed Arizona gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake, who are diehard Trump loyalists, and established party leaders such as likely Speaker of the House Kevin McCarthy, who is openly terrified to cross the former president.

I spoke with Draper shortly after the midterm elections, in which the GOP had an unexpectedly poor showing against a massively unpopular Joe Biden. Is this a sign that Trump's hold on his party—and the country—is weakening? And is there any reason to believe that the party of Ronald Reagan and Barry Goldwater may return to its small government roots?

We also talked about Draper's 2014 New York Times Magazine cover story, "Has the Libertarian Moment Finally Arrived?," which prominently featured me and Matt Welch.

Today's sponsor:

• The Reason Speakeasy. The Reason Speakeasy is a live, monthly, unscripted conversation with outspoken defenders of free thinking and heterodoxy in an age of cancel culture and thought police. The next one takes place in New York City on Thursday, December 1, with Nick Gillespie interviewing Kaytlin Bailey, the founder of Old Pros, a sex worker rights group, host of The Oldest Profession Podcast, and the writer and performer of Whore's Eye View, a one-woman show about 10,000 years of prostitution, female emancipation, and sexual freedom. Doors open at 6:00 p.m. Tickets are $10 and include beer, wine, soft drinks, and appetizers. For more details and to buy tickets, go here now.

The post Robert Draper: The GOP Needs a Post-Trump Reality Check appeared first on Reason.com.

As a teenager growing up in Greenwich Village in the late 1960s, Steven Heller improbably became the art director of pioneering alternative publications such as The New York Free Press, the pioneering porn magazine Screw, and The East Village Other before eventually moving on to work at The New York Times and teaching at the School of Visual Arts for decades.

He chronicles his youthful misadventures in Growing Up Underground: A Memoir of Counterculture New York. In November, Heller spoke at the Reason Speakeasy, a monthly, unscripted conversation with outspoken defenders of free thinking and heterodoxy in an age of cancel culture and thought police. In a wide-ranging conversation with me, he regaled the Manhattan audience with tales of arrests on obscenity charges, how design and aesthetics can supercharge the meaning of words and pictures, and why so many in the counterculture adopted exactly the same "uniform of alienation" in the name of individualism.

• The Reason Speakeasy. The Reason Speakeasy is a live, monthly, unscripted conversation with outspoken defenders of free thinking and heterodoxy in an age of cancel culture and thought police. The next one takes place in New York City on Thursday, December 1, with Nick Gillespie interviewing Kaytlin Bailey, the founder of Old Pros, a sex worker rights group, host of The Oldest Profession Podcast, and the writer and performer of Whore's Eye View, a one-woman show about 10,000 years of prostitution, female emancipation, and sexual freedom. Doors open at 6:00 p.m. Tickets are $10 and include beer, wine, soft drinks, and appetizers. For more details and to buy tickets, go here now.

The post Steven Heller: Growing Up Underground appeared first on Reason.com.

The libertarian movement has lost its way over the past 60 years as it's shifted from Friedrich Hayek's classical liberal corrective to Depression-era central planning to Murray Rothbard's full-blown anarcho-capitalism in which all taxation is theft and all transfer payments are immoral.

That's the argument in a provocative new book called Burning Down the House: How Libertarian Philosophy was corrupted by Delusion and Greed, by Andrew Koppelman. Along the way, he critiques major libertarian figures such as Ayn Rand, Robert Nozick, Ron Paul, and Charles Koch.

I spoke with Koppelman, a law professor at Northwestern University, about why he believes classical liberals have given ground to anarchists and how that fundamentally changes not just the rhetoric but the political goals of the libertarian movement.

Today's sponsor:

• The Reason Speakeasy. The Reason Speakeasy is a live, monthly, unscripted conversation with outspoken defenders of free thinking and heterodoxy in an age of cancel culture and thought police. The next one takes place in New York City on Thursday, December 1, with Nick Gillespie interviewing Kaytlin Bailey, the founder of Old Pros, a sex worker rights group, host of The Oldest Profession Podcast, and the writer and performer of Whore's Eye View, a one-woman show about 10,000 years of prostitution, female emancipation, and sexual freedom. Doors open at 6:00 p.m. Tickets are $10 and include beer, wine, soft drinks, and appetizers. For more details and to buy tickets, go here now.

The post Andrew Koppelman: 'Delusion and Greed' Have Destroyed Libertarianism appeared first on Reason.com.

Today's episode is guest-hosted by my Reason TV colleague Zach Weissmueller. Zach went to Philadelphia to talk with Maj Toure, who runs the Solutionary Center in North Philadelphia. It's a place for locals to learn firearms skills and safety, how to avoid and de-escalate conflicts, and to pick up other life skills ranging from first aid to yoga to phlebotomy. "We hear a lot of people say, 'If these communities would just pull themselves up by the bootstraps,'" says Maj. "Okay, this is the bootstraps."

The Philly native is a hardcore libertarian, founder of the gun rights group Black Guns Matter, and a supporter of the Mises Caucus that recently took control of the Libertarian Party. He tells Reason that libertarians can improve their outreach in urban America by getting behind leaders and organizers who have an intuitive understanding of the needs and concerns of the residents who live there.

Here is the Reason interview with Maj Toure.

Today's sponsors:

• Better Help online therapy. Are you having trouble solving problems in your life? Start talking to a licensed therapist who won't judge you but will listen and help you with your problems, whatever they are. Better Help is cheaper than most traditional forms of therapy and lets you talk with your therapist via chat, phone, or video—all within 48 hours of signing up and without the hassles of in-person appointments. Go here and get 10 percent off your first month as a listener to The Reason Interview With Nick Gillespie.
• The Reason Speakeasy. The Reason Speakeasy is a live, monthly, unscripted conversation with outspoken defenders of free thinking and heterodoxy in an age of cancel culture and thought police. The next one takes place in New York City on Thursday, December 1, with Nick Gillespie interviewing Kaytlin Bailey, the founder of Old Pros, a sex worker rights group, host of The Oldest Profession Podcast, and the writer and performer of Whore's Eye View, a one-woman show about 10,000 years of prostitution, female emancipation, and sexual freedom. Doors open at 6:00 p.m. Tickets are $10 and include beer, wine, soft drinks, and appetizers. For more details and to buy tickets, go here now.

The post Maj Toure: Why Black Guns—and Libertarianism—Matter appeared first on Reason.com.

Over the past decade, no social critic has been more withering toward identity politics and cancel culture than Andrew Doyle, the playwright, comedian, and journalist from Northern Ireland. Whether it's creating the parodic Twitter personality Titania McGrath or penning a best-selling defense of free speech, the Oxford-educated Doyle has never missed an opportunity to show the folly of the political correctness currently eating its way through our universities, corporations, and politics like termites through soft wood.

His new book is The New Puritans: How the Religion of Social Justice Captured the Western World, and I spoke with him about the sources of and solutions to what he calls the "frenzy of conformity" that characterizes so much of contemporary media, academia, and policy.

Previous appearances by Doyle on The Reason Interview With Nick Gillespie:

"Andrew Doyle: Free Speech and Why It Matters," June 2, 2021.

"Meet Titania McGrath, the Wokest SJW on Twitter," February 5, 2020.

The post Andrew Doyle: How the 'New Puritans' Created a 'Frenzy of Conformity' appeared first on Reason.com.

Larry Krasner wants to fix America's criminal justice system, which imprisons more people per capita than any other country on the planet. Since 2018, he's served as the district attorney of Philadelphia—one of America's most highly incarcerated and crime-ridden cities.

Krasner spent three decades as a criminal and civil rights defense attorney before deciding to run for office.

"Our movement did the uncomfortable thing: We took back power," he wrote in a memoir about his successful 2017 run to become Philadelphia's district attorney. "We outsiders went inside and took over the institution we had fought against all our lives."

In his first week as D.A., Krasner fired 31 staffers and replaced them with a new team that he described as "ideologically attached to the mission."

"It's a pretty basic mission for people who are in favor of freedom," Krasner tells Reason. "One of those missions is to be less incarcerated than Vladimir Putin's Russia. I don't think that should be very controversial."

Krasner won reelection easily last year, but today he's under intense pressure. Philadelphia posted a record 562 murders in 2021, and it's on pace for a similar outcome in 2022. The Republican-led state Legislature has begun impeachment proceedings against him.

Reason's Zach Weissmueller sat down with Krasner in his office to talk about his reforms, his city's spike in violent crime, the heat that progressive prosecutors are feeling in places like Los Angeles and San Francisco, and what that means for the future of American criminal justice reform.

Additional links to data referenced in this podcast:

Decriminalisation of Drugs What can we learn from Portugal? by Pierre Andersson

The Red State Murder Problem, by Kylie Murdock and Jim Kessler of Third Way

"Murders Are Rising. Blaming a Party Doesn't Add Up." by Jeff Asher

Pennsylvania Uniform Crime Reporting System

Philadelphia Police Department's crime maps and statistics

Fort Worth's Updated 2020 4th Quarter Crime Report

"Murder rate in Jacksonville dropped 23% in 2021 compared to 2020, according to sheriff," by Heather Crawford

"Homicides and overall violent crime are up in Philadelphia," by Isaac Avilucea

FBI historic crime statistics by city and region

The post Larry Krasner: Are Progressive Prosecutors Responsible for the Urban Crime Spike? appeared first on Reason.com.

Over the past 50 years, boys and men have lost ground at school and work and they're living shorter lives. They're less likely than women to graduate from high school and college or to earn advanced degrees. They're dropping out of the labor force in record numbers and account for two-thirds of the so-called deaths of despair stemming from suicide, alcoholism, and drug overdoses.

The Brookings Institution scholar Richard V. Reeves documents these and other, equally dark developments in Of Boys and Men: Why the Modern Male Is Struggling, Why It Matters, and What To Do About It. He analyzes the structural factors exacerbating these trends—such as the changing nature of work in a postindustrial economy—and suggests solutions that don't come at the expense of women.

I spoke with Reeves at the Reason Speakeasy, a monthly, unscripted conversation in New York City with outspoken defenders of free thinking and heterodoxy in an era of conformity and groupthink.

0:00 Intro
01:43 Education and Men
9:00 Work and Men
18:26 Health and Men
23:12 Gains of Men
28:08 Deindustrialization
30: 30 Decline in Education Performance
40:18 Biology and Men
43:58 Decline in Work Performance
50:04 Affect on Black Men
54:52What the Left Gets Wrong
58:17 What the Right Gets Wrong
1:03:34 Solutions
1:09:26 Nursing
1:14:15 VoTech
1:17:25 Audience Q&A
1:30:30 Masculinity in Crisis

The post Richard V. Reeves: Why Are Men Failing at School, Work, and Life? appeared first on Reason.com.

In 2013, the serial entrepreneur Balaji Srinivasan gave a widely discussed talk at the tech incubator Y Combinator on a paradigm derived from the work of political economist Albert O. Hirschman. There are two basic paths to reform, he explained: You can speak up and remake a system from within ("voice") or you can simply leave and build something new that might one day takes its place ("exit").

That latter concept is the framework through which Silicon Valley tends to solve problems, and it captures the worldview of Srinivasan, whom venture capitalist Marc Andreessen says has "the highest output per minute of new ideas of anybody I've ever met in my life."

In his new book, The Network State: How to Start a New Country, Srinivasan makes the case for migrating much—though not all—of our lives onto the internet while changing how we get together in meatspace. Ever-improving digital tools give humans an unprecedented and always-accelerating ability to create opt-in, fully voluntary communities where people choose to meet, work, live, and love.

From existing, terrestrial countries that are attracting immigrants with the promise of a better standard of living to blockchain communities that draw participants by laying out clear-cut, contractual rules, responsibilities, and obligations, Srinivasan articulates a future that is profoundly democratic and consensual—thus liberating us from a status quo in which self-determination is little more than a pipe-dream.

Raised in suburban Long Island, Srinivasan holds a Ph.D. in electrical engineering from Stanford. He co-founded the genetic testing firm Counsyl and served as the first chief technology officer of Coinbase, the cryptocurrency exchange. He's been a fierce critic of the FDA, which might account for his being short-listed to head up the agency under President Donald Trump.

"What if this coronavirus is the pandemic that public health people have been warning about for years?," he tweeted in January 2020, as Vox and mainstream outlets were busy attacking Silicon Valley venture capitalists for taking the crisis too seriously. "It would accelerate many pre-existing trends," he wrote, "border closures, nationalism, social isolation, preppers, remote work, face masks, distrust in governments."

I talked with Srinivasan about The Network State, the rise of China as a tightly centralized global power, and the future of freedom both online and offline.*

CORRECTION: The original version of this writeup mischaracterized Srinivasan's opinion on whether Peter Thiel is part of the "descending class."

• Better Help online therapy. Are you having trouble solving problems in your life? Start talking to a licensed therapist who won't judge you but will listen and help you with your problems, whatever they are. Better Help is cheaper than most traditional forms of therapy and lets you talk with your therapist via chat, phone, or video—all within 48 hours of signing up and without the hassles of in-person appointments. Go here and get 10 percent off your first month as a listener to The Reason Interview With Nick Gillespie.

The post Balaji Srinivasan: How To Build Your Own Country in the Cloud appeared first on Reason.com.

The killings of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor in 2020 touched off a summer of protests over police brutality, especially with regard to African Americans and Hispanics.

To many, the killings cemented as fact a narrative that began with the 2014 death of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, and found expression in highly charged slogans such as "all cops are bastards" and "defund the police." Reformers charge that cops, far from keeping the peace, are simply the most visible agents of white supremacy who systematically surveil and punish racial and ethnic minorities. Long-stalled reforms, such as abolishing qualified immunity and ending cash bail, made big gains as massive crowds marched under the banner of Black Lives Matter.

But what if the narrative that police are increasingly dangerous, violent, and unaccountable is wrong?

In Criminal (In)Justice, Rafael A. Mangual argues that police violence is in fact rare and declining. What's more, he says that the criminal justice reforms favored by social justice activists—and many libertarians—will make life worse for communities of color. "If we're going to have an honest conversation about where reform needs to happen," says Mangual, "we have to be realistic about what the real scope of the problem is because that's the best way that we're going to be able to assess what can actually fix that problem."

Mangual is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, the New York City think tank that played a foundational role in the shift in policing tactics that began in the early 1990s. It published the work of George L. Kelling and James Q. Wilson on broken windows policing and championed the development of the crime-tracking program CompStat under New York City Police Commissioner William Bratton.

Mangual grew up in Brooklyn and Long Island, the half-Dominican, half-Puerto Rican son of a New York Police Department detective. He attended Baruch College in the City University of New York system and holds a law degree from Chicago's DePaul University.

I talked with him about the facts and rhetoric surrounding law enforcement, whether violent crime is actually rising, and what the best ways are to keep the peace without harassing and locking up innocent people.

The post Is a War on Policing Increasing Crime? Q&A With Rafael Mangual appeared first on Reason.com.

No governor is more cheered and hated right now than Florida Republican Ron DeSantis, currently in the news for flying around 50 Venezuelan migrants to Martha's Vineyard to own the libs. The 44-year-old Navy veteran and double-Ivy-Leaguer also headlined the third National Conservatism Conference, where he emphasized that the state should punish and reward businesses and individuals based on political positions.

Controversially, DeSantis has yanked longstanding tax breaks for Walt Disney Corporation after the company criticized his stance on gay rights, signed legislation that would limit social media platforms' ability to moderate content and users (the law has been blocked by a federal court), banned mask mandates in public schools, and issued an executive order prohibiting businesses from requiring proof of vaccination from customers. He's also pushed cities such as Gainesville to abandon zoning reform aimed at creating more diverse, multi-family housing.

If such top-down edicts seem at odds with traditional conservative support for local decision making and letting businesses act however they want, DeSantis has also gotten high marks for mostly keeping K-12 schools open during the pandemic and overseeing a boom in people moving to Florida to escape lockdowns elsewhere. When COVID death rates are adjusted for the age of residents, Florida's rate (275 per 100,000) draws close to California's (267 per 100,000), while both are below the national average (302 per 100,000).  He's a strong supporter of gun rights and signed a $1.2 billion tax break package this spring, promising even more cuts if he gets reelected in November. Despite increased levels of spending each year of his governorship, the state is currently sitting on a $22 billion budget surplus.

So how should libertarians think about Ron DeSantis? Is he "a retaliatory culture warrior" and the leading indicator of an "authoritarian convergence" of the right and left? Or is he a successful large-state governor, the future of the Republican party, and, quite possibly, the next president of the United States? How should libertarians think about his mix of bullying and bravura that is turning the Sunshine State from a joke to one of the hottest destinations in the country?

I recently hosted a conversation about DeSantis and Florida with two recent blue-state refugees: Reason Senior Producer Zach Weissmueller, who pulled up stakes in California, and New York Post columnist Karol Markowicz, who hightailed it out of New York.

The post How Should Libertarians Think About Ron DeSantis? appeared first on Reason.com.

Did you know that Otto Frank, the father of Anne, repeatedly tried to emigrate with his family to the United States after the Nazis came to power in his native Germany? Each attempt failed due to American immigration restrictions put into place in the 1920s.

Two-thirds of European Jews were killed by the Nazis during World War II in a systematic, relentless process that still exceeds our ability to comprehend its origins and consequences. The Final Solution, which was the Nazi plan to exterminate all European Jews, wasn't implemented until 1942, but Hitler's government had begun openly dehumanizing, harassing, and attacking Jews upon taking power nine years earlier.

Even when the Nazi death machine kicked into high gear, America kept its doors mostly closed to Jews such as the Franks, as filmmakers Ken Burns, Lynn Novick, and Sarah Botstein recount in The U.S. and the Holocaust, a new three-part documentary series on PBS.

Some lobbied to open the country to refugees in the run-up to war, but anti-immigration legislation, the economic devastation of the Depression, incredulity toward a press that had trafficked in false atrocity accounts during World War I, and deep-seated antisemitism, especially in Franklin D. Roosevelt's State Department, combined to thwart those efforts.

I talked with Burns and Novick about why a nation of immigrants remains so deeply ambivalent about newcomers and the lessons that 21st-century America should draw from our country's response in the lead-up to the Holocaust.

Today's sponsor:

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The post Ken Burns, Lynn Novick: How Closed Borders Helped Facilitate the Holocaust appeared first on Reason.com.

Today's guest is Phil Magness, the intellectual watchdog based at the American Institute for Economic Research (AIER) who is keeping tight tabs on suspect claims from journalists and academics. 

His targets have included Nikole Hannah-Jones, the creator of The New York Times' Pulitzer Prize–winning series The 1619 Project, which Magness documented was being stealth-edited after several prominent historians pointed out major errors in its analysis. He's also gone after Hans-Herman Hoppe, a professor emeritus at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, and a distinguished senior fellow at the Mises Institute. Hoppe is an arch critic of democracy and increasingly influential within the Libertarian Party. But despite his affiliation with a group named for the eminent Austrian economist Ludwig von Mises, Magness says that Hoppe presents "the complete inversion of Mises' thought," especially when it comes to immigration.

Magness has a Ph.D. from George Mason University's school of public policy, and he's written and co-written books on what he calls "the moral mess of higher education" and on Abraham Lincoln's plan for black resettlement after emancipation. 

This interview was recorded at FreedomFest, the annual July gathering in Las Vegas, and we also talk about specious attacks on the school choice movement and Nobel laureate economist James Buchanan as racist, as well as Magness' excellent Reason article from earlier this year that has led to the ongoing plagiarism investigation of Princeton historian Kevin Kruse. We also discuss Magness' new project of figuring out how Karl Marx became such a powerful influence on 20th- and 21st-century thinking despite being relatively obscure during his lifetime.

Today's sponsor:

• Better Help online therapy. Are you having trouble solving problems in your life? Start talking to a licensed therapist who won't judge you but will listen and help you with your problems, whatever they are. Better Help is cheaper than most traditional forms of therapy and lets you talk with your therapist via chat, phone, or video—all within 48 hours of signing up and without the hassles of in-person appointments. Go here and get 10 percent off your first month as a listener to The Reason Interview With Nick Gillespie.

The post Phil Magness: Holding Leftists and Libertarians Accountable appeared first on Reason.com.

"I came to realize that economists…tend to focus on things that can be measured," says Russ Roberts, host of the long-running podcast, EconTalk, and author of the new book Wild Problems. "Dignity is hard to measure. A sense of self is hard to measure. Belonging is hard to measure. A feeling of transcendence is hard to measure. Mattering—that you are important, that people look to you. [These sorts of things are] about the life well-lived and they're not about getting the most out of your money. They're not about what the interest rates are next week. And economists truthfully have virtually nothing to say about these things."

Roberts is an economist by training whose great theme over the past 40-plus years has been the fundamental inadequacy of his chosen discipline to really comprehend what matters most to the people it seeks to explain and understand. Wild Problems deals with the decisions that define us—such as whether to marry, whether to have kids, and what kind of work to pursue—that don't yield to anything like easy cost-benefit analyses.

I talk with Roberts about how to navigate the increasing amount of choice most of us have gained over the past 50 years and how to make sense of a world that is richer than ever in material resources but seemingly lacking in deeper meaning. We discuss Roberts' own life, from earning a Ph.D. in economics at the University of Chicago in the 1970s to starting EconTalk, one of the longest-running podcasts around, to becoming president of Shalem College, a private liberal arts college in Israel, and the central role that religion plays in his life.

Previous Reason interviews with Russ Roberts:

"Why the Middle Class Is Better Off Than You Think," October 31, 2019

"Should You Be Optimistic About America's Future?" April 26, 2018

"Adam Smith's Surprising Guide to Happiness (but Not Wealth)," October 8, 2014

"Why Keynesians Always Get It Wrong (and Most Economists Too)," October 11, 2012

"The Price of Everything," October 23, 2008

"What You Need To Know About the Bailout," October 7, 2008

Today's sponsor:

• Everyday Dose is the coffee alternative I start my days with. It's made from nonpsychedelic mushrooms, collagen, and nootropics that elevate my mood, sharpen my focus, and give me an energy boost, all without the jitters and digestive issues that come with drinking traditional coffee. It tastes great too and is quick and easy to make. Try risk-free, with a 60-day, money-back guarantee by going here now.

The post Russ Roberts: Why Economists Are Irrelevant appeared first on Reason.com.

You've probably heard the latest news that school lockdowns during the COVID pandemic are responsible for erasing two decades of progress in math and reading test scores. On national tests of 9-year-olds, math scores declined seven points between 2020 and 2022. Reading scores dropped by five points. These are "some of the largest declines" in half a century.

Such news comes on top of the massive frustration about chaotic, nonsensical openings and closings of schools, unscientific mask mandates for K-12 students, and insane policies like one in Washington, D.C., where the mayor and City Council recently decreed that kids ages 12 and older would need to be vaccinated even for remote learning, a measure that would have barred 40 percent of the city's black teens from getting an education. That policy was, thankfully, pushed back until January 2023, but it's still on the books, lurking like a bully at the far end of the hallway.

Today's guest on The Reason Interview With Nick Gillespie is Corey DeAngelis, a senior fellow at the American Federation for Children. Corey used to work at Reason Foundation, the nonprofit that publishes this podcast, has a Ph.D. in education from the University of Arkansas, and is widely recognized as one of the leading activists pushing for radical school choice, in which funding dollars follow children to whatever learning institutions they and their parents decide on, whether private, public, religious, secular, charter, online, you name it.

I caught up with Corey at FreedomFest, the annual gathering in Las Vegas, just after Arizona had passed the biggest school choice law in the country, with $7,000 of state funding now following each student per year. We talked about how COVID lockdowns—so heavily pushed by teachers unions—radically raised parental awareness about how bad most K-12 education is; why top-down attempts to ban critical race theory and other specific curricula are misguided and ineffective; recent Supreme Court decisions that rightly get rid of legal concerns over tax dollars funding students at religious schools; why Texas is so incredibly awful on school choice despite being run by Republicans; why Republicans have nonetheless emerged as the party of school choice; and why all of us, whether we have kids in the K-12 gulag system or not, should be invested in education reform.

The post Corey DeAngelis: COVID Lockdowns Made School Choice Inevitable appeared first on Reason.com.

"I think you could argue that Alice Waters changed us almost as much as Steve Jobs did, almost as much as Chairman Mao did. I mean, it's extraordinary to see what follows from her creation of a tiny restaurant in Berkeley in 1971," says anthropologist Grant McCracken. "The artisanal revolution ushers in a new model of production and consumption. At its best, it ushers in a cruelty-free capitalism or aims for something like that."

Steve Jobs, Mao, and…Alice Waters? Who is she, exactly?

I'll get to that in a moment, but first, let me ask you a question: While you're hanging out in your hip, handmade loungewear, sipping your pot-still bourbon, and noshing on some homemade sourdough bread covered with butter you churned yourself from your neighbor's stash of unpasteurized goat milk, did you ever stop to wonder just how you—and America writ large—got to a place where Wonder Bread is a shorthand for all that is terrible and mediocre and any sort of super-rustic, craggy, unsliced, dense, dark loaf of barely processed grain is a sign not just of cultural sophistication but of moral superiority? 

Only a generation or two ago—for our parents and grandparents—the cutting edge of consumption was to buy the most industrial, machine-made products you could afford, preferably objects that had never been touched by human hands and carried a brand insignia that conveyed high status or value. When it came to even white-collar jobs, the dream was often to dress exactly like everybody else and work for a giant corporation that was bigger than the market and, thus, could guarantee you a job for life. You died and went to heaven if you were an IBM salesman, all of whom wore blue suits, white shirts, red ties, and black shoes.

But now we live in an artisanal age, where everything is small-batched and hyper-personalized. This revolution has been building for years or even decades, and now it is everywhere around us, influencing not just what we wear, eat, and listen to but how we work, where we live, and how we think of our deepest identities. Mass production, including of personalities and social types, is out, and individualization is in.

In Return of the Artisan, anthropologist Grant McCracken explains "how America went from industrial to handmade" in the post–World War II era. This is a funny, deep, and well-written book that takes us to small towns and hipster neighborhoods all over the country, from New York City to Bowling Green, Kentucky, to Berkeley, California, where Alice Waters changed everything when she opened up a revolutionary new restaurant called Chez Panisse.

There's no better guide to this brave new—and sometimes incredibly annoying—world than McCracken, a Baby Boomer raised in British Columbia during the 1960s and an early theorist of how the digital revolution and rise of the internet were remaking us in ways that are mostly better but also deeply challenging to community. His own life is as long and strange a trip as the one he documents in Return of the Artisan.

Previous Reason interviews with and select articles by Grant McCracken:

"Is America Too Forgiving? The Case of Lance Armstrong," February 20, 2021

"Grant McCracken: The New Honor Code vs. Radical Wokeism," February 3, 2021

"How To Have a Good Idea: A unified theory of fantasy football; Eat, Pray, Love; and Burning Man," December 2012

"How Cultural Innovation Happens: Q&A with Anthropologist Grant McCracken," June 7, 2011

"The Politics of Plenitude," August/September 1998

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The post Grant McCracken: The Rise of Artisanal Everything and 'Cruelty-Free Capitalism' appeared first on Reason.com.

My guest today is Julie Holland, a psychiatrist whose newest book is Good Chemistry: The Science of Connection from Soul to Psychedelics.

It's a fantastic read that is steeped in the latest research about what she calls the loneliness epidemic and the psychopharmacology that is helping us find our way forward. When I asked her to summarize what her book is about, she told me, "Good Chemistry is about all the good stuff, how you can feel good, with or without drugs." That last point is particularly important, I think: Drugs are tools that can help us become all that we can be (to paraphrase the United States Army's advertising slogan in the 1980s), but they are neither necessary nor sufficient by themselves.

At 56, Holland is armed with degrees from Philadelphia's University of Pennsylvania and Temple University and decades of clinical and research experience. She's a legend and pioneer in the psychedelic space, where she has long worked with groups such as MAPs (the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies) and edited volumes such as Ecstasy: The Complete Guide and The Pot Book: A Complete Guide to Cannabis. She's one of the people who is building out what I think of as a post-prohibition drug culture by asking what our world might look like when we are finally free from government restrictions on all the tools available to us to actualize fully as individuals and as a society.

Holland is also the author of the bestsellers Moody Bitches and Weekends at Bellevue, parent to two kids, a musician, and a headliner at The Psychedelic Assembly, a fantastic event this September 10 and 11 in New York City at which I'll also be appearing.

Today's sponsors:

• Everyday Dose is the coffee alternative I start my days with. It's made from non-psychedelic mushrooms, collagen, and nootropics that elevate my mood, sharpen my focus, and give me an energy boost, all without the jitters and digestive issues that come with drinking traditional coffee. It tastes great, too, and is quick and easy to make. Try risk-free, with a 60-day, money-back guarantee by going here now.
• The Reason Rundown with Peter Suderman. Free minds. Free markets. Big stories. That's The Reason Rundown, which comes out every Friday. End the week with concise, thought-provoking stories from the journalists at Reason, the magazine of logic, not legends; coherence, not contradictions. Hosted by Features Editor Peter Suderman, each episode he talks to a single Reason journalist about a single big story. Subscribe today.

The post Julie Holland: 'How You Can Feel Good, With or Without Drugs' appeared first on Reason.com.

I've long found The Babylon Bee to be fantastically funny—all the more so because its editors and writers are hardcore born-again evangelical Christians who believe that the Bible is the inerrant word of God. That's not a creed one usually associates with anything remotely funny, at least intentionally. Pat Robertson, Jerry Falwell, and Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker aren't people you seek out for the jokes.

Other comedy sites like The Onion don't have to operate under such limiting, self-imposed strictures. The fact that the Bee is very funny, day in and day out, is almost enough to get me, a lapsed Catholic, to believe in divine intervention, if not a covenant of grace not works.

I caught up with Kyle Mann, the Bee's editor in chief, in July at FreedomFest, the annual gathering in Las Vegas. I was especially interested in talking about the site's Twitter account getting frozen earlier this year. Back in March, Twitter suspended the account after it awarded "Man of the Year" honors to Rachel Levine, a trans woman serving in the Biden administration who had been named one of USA Today's "Women of the Year."

The Bee's article struck me as mean-spirited, especially for Christians, and not particularly funny—ditto for recent trans joking by great standups like Dave Chappelle and Ricky Gervais, too. In today's show, Mann tells me that the offending article was intended to satirize media treatment of identity politics, not demean trans people.

"We love trans people," he says. "We don't consider people like that beneath us. You know, the Christian worldview is that everybody has the opportunity to be saved and we can love everybody. I'm no more deserving of God's grace than a transgender person is. But when the culture bows down and starts handing out trophies to people for stuff like this is when we say, 'Hey, wait a minute, you know, we need to protect women in our society as well.'"

The Babylon Bee's Twitter account remains locked because the publication refuses to delete the tweet and acknowledge that it violated Twitter's policy against hate speech. In response to the Twitter ban and what Mann says is persistent demonetization and minimizing of the reach of its content on Facebook, The Babylon Bee has created its own social network and subscription model, both of which are flourishing. The episode shines a light on how contemporary culture wars are waged online and illustrates the specific travails that evangelical Christians face in a country that is increasingly secular and socially liberal. It also shows one successful way of routing around platform-specific censorship.

Beyond that, we talk about why Mann saves his deepest burns for megachurch pastors such as Joel Osteen; why he believes that the left—and Gen Z—can't deal with humor that makes fun of them; and why he loves "personal liberty and personal freedom" even if it creates a culture that is deeply hostile to his faith.

Video version here.

Today's sponsors:

• Everyday Dose is the coffee alternative I start my days with. It's made from non-psychedelic mushrooms, collagen, and nootropics that elevate my mood, sharpen my focus, and give me an energy boost, all without the jitters and digestive issues that come with drinking traditional coffee. It tastes great, too, and is quick and easy to make. Try risk-free, with a 60-day, money-back guarantee by going here now.
• The Reason Rundown with Peter Suderman. Free minds. Free markets. Big stories. That's The Reason Rundown, which comes out every Friday. End the week with concise, thought-provoking stories from the journalists at Reason, the magazine of logic, not legends; coherence, not contradictions. Hosted by Features Editor Peter Suderman, each episode he talks to a single Reason journalist about a single big story. Subscribe today.

The post <i>The Babylon Bee</i>'s Kyle Mann: 'I'm No More Deserving of God's Grace Than a Transgender Person Is' appeared first on Reason.com.

"I think the second-wave feminists I've talked to are very worried about the kind of woke, gender-identity movement because it's reducing women to just body parts," says Michael Shermer. "A guy can say, 'Well, if I just get breast implants [and] then I can have a vaginoplasty made out of a piece of my skin, I'm in. I'm a woman, right?' Well, no, because women are not just tits and ass. There's more to it than that, a lot more."

That's today's guest, Michael Shermer, who for decades has been one of the most popular and provocative explicators of science to popular audiences, having authored bestselling books such as Why People Believe Weird Things, Why Darwin Matters, The Moral Arc, and The Mind of the Market. He founded Skeptic magazine in 1992, hosts a video podcast with leading activists and intellectuals, and, for nearly 20 years, authored a widely read column for Scientific American in which he debunked beliefs in UFOs and other paranormal phenomena, explained the rise of the "new atheism," and showed how evolution systematically informs human behavior.

Shermer's work is deeply and explicitly rooted in libertarian and Enlightenment ideas about individual responsibility, free market economics, rationality, and the search for something approaching objective truth. In 2019, Scientific American cut him loose, a move he ascribes to the publication's suffocating embrace of the sort of identity politics and wokeness that he says dominates academic and intellectual circles and, increasingly, the culture at large.

Last fall, Shermer, who holds a Ph.D. in the history of science and teaches Skepticism 101 at Chapman University, started a weekly Substack where he posts podcasts and the columns he would have written for Scientific American.

I caught up with the 67-year-old former competitive cyclist during FreedomFest, an annual gathering in Las Vegas. We talked about what he sees as the fundamental clash between wokeness and scientific inquiry, how hard it is to overcome the cognitive biases we all have, why he thinks trans athletes should be banned from most women's sports, why we have so much trouble acknowledging moral and technological progress, and why he now identifies as a classical liberal rather than as a libertarian.

Given his cycling background, we talk about Lance Armstrong and the widespread but illicit use of performance-enhancing drugs, which leads to all sorts of hypocritical and sociopathic behavior among so many of us. We also discuss how technology—including drugs—fuels human excellence in sports, business, and our personal and professional lives.

Previous Reason interviews with Michael Shermer:
"The Future of Science," by Matt Welch (December 28, 2018)
"Nick Gillespie and Skeptic Magazine's Michael Shermer on Postmodernism, Rationalism, and The Intellectual Dark Web," by Zach Weissmueller (December 21, 2018)
"Michael Shermer on Why Even Scientists, Transhumanists, and Atheists Want To Believe in Heaven," by Nick Gillespie (August 3, 2018)
"Reason and Science Make Us Moral: Michael Shermer on The Moral Arc," by Zach Weissmueller (January 20, 2015)
"Skeptic Michael Shermer on Atheism, Happiness, and the Free Market," by Reason Staff (December 7. 2010)
"Michael Shermer on the Modern History of Skepticism," by Reason Staff (August 7, 2009)
"Monkeys and Money," by Nick Gillespie (March 31, 2008)
"Michael Shermer: Evolutionary Economics and the Google Theory of Peace," by Dan Hayes (January 22, 2008)

Today's sponsors:

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The post Michael Shermer: 'Women Are Not Just Tits and Ass. There's More to It Than That, a Lot More.' appeared first on Reason.com.

"My concern is that I feel like socialists are taking over," Whole Foods CEO John Mackey tells me on today's show. "They're marching through the institutions. They're…taking over education. It looks like they've taken over a lot of the corporations. It looks like they've taken over the military. And it's just continuing. You know, I'm a capitalist at heart, and I believe in liberty and capitalism. Those are my twin values. And I feel like, you know, with the way freedom of speech is today, the movement on gun control, a lot of the liberties that I've taken for granted most of my life, I think, are under threat."

If you're as old as I am (I just turned 59), you will remember how dreary food shopping was before Whole Foods exploded the concept since it came on the scene in 1978. When I was a kid, you were lucky to find two or three types of potatoes in the produce aisle, one type of eggplant, maybe a green bell pepper, and a sad jalapeno or two (jalapenos were almost always sold pickled and in cans). Even in big cities, you had to roam around all over town to find oddball spices that you can now pick up in 7-11s and gas station convenience stores. 

At the end of August, Mackey, born in 1953, is retiring from Whole Foods. Throughout his career, John has developed and evangelized for what he calls "conscious capitalism," or businesses that seek to "create financial, intellectual, social, cultural, emotional, spiritual, physical, and ecological wealth for all of their stakeholders." That may sound a bit hippy-dippy to you, but John is one of the most hardcore capitalists I've ever met, yet also an incredibly spiritual and thoughtful guy who wants to help all of us live better, more interesting lives.

That comes through loud and clear in his epic 2005 debate with Nobel laureate Milton Freidman and former Cypress Semiconductor CEO T.J. Rodgers about rethinking the social responsibility of business. "I believe that the enlightened corporation should try to create value for all of its constituencies," wrote John. "From an investor's perspective, the purpose of the business is to maximize profits. But that's not the purpose for other stakeholders—for customers, employees, suppliers, and the community. Each of those groups will define the purpose of the business in terms of its own needs and desires, and each perspective is valid and legitimate." In many profound ways, John's vision is now widely accepted, partly because he's speaking to a post-industrial world that is rich enough that more and more of us are starting to bump our snouts further up Abraham Maslow's hierarchy of needs. Even in the developing world, more and more of us are trying to figure out how we can flourish rather than just subsist.

I caught up with John at FreedomFest, the annual gathering in Las Vegas, and we talked about his time at Whole Foods, how his company did an exceptional job of staying open and serving people during COVID, what he thought about the government's response to the pandemic, and a whole lot more. We also, of course, talked about what he's going to do once he's retired.

In terms of business ventures, he's planning to open a series of wellness centers and cafes. Of greater interest to me, John said that he felt muzzled in his position as CEO of Whole Foods. For many reasons, he says he couldn't speak his mind on various issues, especially what he sees as a dangerous drift toward more and more control of everyday life, commerce, and speech. That all changes in September, he said, and we should expect him to be even more outspoken in his celebration of capitalism, which he considers the greatest anti-poverty program ever created, and many other issues.

Previous Reason interviews with John Mackey:

"Can 'Conscious Capitalism' Make Business a Heroic Enterprise? John Mackey Is Betting Yes: Podcast," August 14, 2018

"John Mackey's Merger Made in Heaven," July 1, 2018

"'They're More Conscious and More Awake than My Generation Was,'" March 31, 2018

"Whole Foods' John Mackey on Amazon Merger: 'A Meeting of the Souls,'" March 30, 2018

"Whole Foods' John Mackey on Veganism, Gary Johnson, and How Regulation Is Stunting Innovation," August 16, 2016

"Whole Foods' John Mackey: Why Intellectuals Hate Capitalism," August 12, 2015

"John Mackey on Whole Foods, Conscious Capitalism, and Life Beyond the Profit Motive," March 21, 2013

"Whole Foods CEO John Mackey on the Moral Case for Capitalism," August 10, 2012

"Whole Foods Health Care," December 15, 2009

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William Faulkner once famously wrote, "The past is never dead. It's not even past."  I've been thinking a lot about that quote, which comes from his 1951 novel Requiem for a Nun, in regards to today's guest, George Dawes Green.

George is the creator of the massively popular event series, radio show, and podcast The Moth, which has redefined personal storytelling in the digital age. George is also a novelist, and his new book, the best-selling murder mystery The Kingdoms of Savannah, is set in his native Georgia and features a great contemporary update of Faulkner's themes.

What Faulkner, the great neo-Gothic chronicler of the pre–civil rights movement South, was getting at is the idea that if you don't deal with history honestly and truthfully, it keeps getting in the way of your present and future, like the ghost of the murdered king in Hamlet. Individuals and societies alike can't move forward until some form of acknowledgment and justice for past crimes has taken place. That's at the heart of Gothic literature, which is filled with ruins and ghosts and secrets from the past irrupting into the present. It's why the characters in Faulkner's work are literally and figuratively haunted by race relations that they haven't honestly accounted for. That focus on the unaccounted-for past is the reason that Faulkner, who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1949, is one of the most influential figures not just for American authors like Toni Morrison (herself a Nobelist) but also for writers across the globe—the Colombian novelist Gabriel García Márquez called him "my master" in his Nobel acceptance speech. In too many parts of the world, the past isn't past.

This brings me back to George Dawes Green. The Kingdoms of Savannah is set in the contemporary South and features an old-line aristocratic family whose fortunes and members have dissipated over the years, in part because of hidden secrets and an inability to move on. At the start of the novel, there's a murder that implicates the power structure of Savannah, and the result is a page-turning thriller about race, class, and American history that I simply couldn't put down.

I talked with George at a recent Reason Speakeasy, a live, monthly, unscripted conversation with outspoken defenders of free thinking and heterodoxy in an era of conformity and groupthink. We talk about his experiences on the frontier of creative expression and the ways in which the past doggedly informs the present, whether in his native Georgia or post-COVID New York.

We also talk about how he came to create The Moth, which is celebrating its 25th anniversary and has become nothing less than a global phenomenon. Not surprisingly, George is himself a masterful storyteller, and his own past reads like something out of a novel: He lived in a cemetery for a while, and he created a company that sold clothes made from rare fabrics handwoven in Guatemala. It was only after all that that he became a novelist whose first two books were turned into movies and a cultural entrepreneur whose biggest project is still going strong. 

The post George Dawes Green: Why the Past—and Storytelling—Is Never Dead appeared first on Reason.com.

Today's guest is the rapper, podcaster, and author, Zuby. He's a social media juggernaut who is known for a popular mix of personal empowerment and political provocation that led to a highly publicized (if temporary) suspension from Twitter in 2020 after he broke the British women's deadlift record and claimed he was the new record holder because he identified as a woman during the lift. We talk about that stunt today, along with lots of other topics.

Born in 1986, Zuby describes himself as "British by birth, Nigerian by blood, Saudi Arabia raised, [and] American at heart." After a childhood in Saudi Arabia, he graduated from Oxford, and now spends most of his time in the United States, where he criticizes identity politics on shows like The Joe Rogan Experience. He tells me that the only way someone can trigger him is by making appeals to racial essentialism and the idea that the United States—or most of Europe and the developed world, for that matter—is fundamentally racist and sexist. He also just published a children's book designed to showcase the benefits of good nutrition, exercise, and self-control.

Earlier this year, Zuby spoke at a Mises Caucus event at the Libertarian Party convention in Reno, Nevada, where he said he was overjoyed to be "talking about freedom, liberty, and all of that good stuff."

I caught up with Zuby at FreedomFest, a conference held annually in Las Vegas, where we discussed his experience of the pandemic while traveling in eight different countries, his defense of tweets mocking transgender athletes (and his support of rights for trans people), and why he's bullish on the future of individual responsibility and freedom.

Today's sponsor:

• The Reason Rundown with Peter Suderman. Free minds. Free markets. Big stories. That's The Reason Rundown, which comes out every Friday. End the week with concise, thought-provoking stories from the journalists at Reason, the magazine of logic, not legends; coherence, not contradictions. Hosted by Features Editor Peter Suderman, each episode he talks to a single Reason journalist about a single big story. Subscribe today.

The post Zuby: 'When I'm in the U.S., My Mind Is Blown by the Opportunities Here' appeared first on Reason.com.

In a career that has spanned seven decades—and included classic shows and movies such as Monty Python's Flying Circus, Fawlty Towers, Life of Brian, and A Fish Called Wanda—the comedian John Cleese has uproariously and relentlessly satirized politics and religion while stretching the boundaries of decorum and good taste like so many silly walks.

Now 82, Cleese—who studied law at Cambridge—has recently set his sights on political correctness and wokeism, which he says are the enemy not only of humor but of creative thinking in all areas of human activity.

I caught up with him at FreedomFest, the annual July gathering of libertarians in Las Vegas. Cleese was the keynote speaker, there to discuss creativity, which was the subject of his 2020 book of the same title. It's a quick and excellent read, summarizing a wide range of psychological research on the topic and drawing from his own experiences.

It's a myth "that creativity is something you have to be born with," he argues. "Anyone can be creative." He also contends that "you can teach creativity," writing, "you can teach people how to create circumstances in which they will become creative."

After giving a talk on the attitudes and habits of mind he believes are necessary for creativity to 2,500 attendees at FreedomFest, I interviewed Cleese from the main stage about the importance of freedom of thought and expression when it comes to being creative, why wokeism is the enemy of that, and why creativity is so important to progress and civilization.

The post John Cleese: Wokeism Is the Enemy of Comedy—and Creativity appeared first on Reason.com.

Today's episode—my absolute favorite to date, after almost six years!—is a marathon session with Penn Jillette, the larger, louder half of the fantastical and magical duo Penn & Teller.

Since the 1980s, Penn & Teller have been part of a broad movement to freakify and weirdo-ize American culture in a way that is profoundly individualistic and idealistic. They have helped to create a world where conformity has increasingly given way to self-expression. Before them, to me at least, magic was something dull, something mostly old men did, with boring card tricks, hokey gimmicks, capes, and magic wands. It was Doug Henning on Broadway with feather bangs and Harry Blackstone Jr. making Jiffy Pop on the stove.

Penn & Teller were so different, so alive and fresh, deconstructing magic at the very time they were blowing your mind. They were the reincarnation of Harry Houdini, with a punk attitude, and to me as a kid growing up in suburban New Jersey, they helped make me believe all things were possible, that you could create the life you wanted. Their fantastic show Bullshit! ran for eight seasons on Showtime, during which they debunked everything from alien abductions to the drug war to penis pumps to xenophobia (they even had me on that episode, speaking up for loosening the borders).

Penn especially captivated me: For my entire adult life, he's been one of the most vocal and visible self-identified libertarians out there, always insisting that, as a starting point in any discussion of any issue or problem, we should start by asking, "Can this be addressed by giving people more freedom to make their own choices?"

As impressive: In the mid-2010s, he dropped 100 pounds in three months for health reasons—personifying the personal responsibility and self-improvement near the very center of libertarianism (check out my 2016 interview with him on all that).

But then, in July 2020, he told the excellent website Big Think that the combination of Donald Trump's election four years earlier and the onset of the COVID pandemic was forcing him to rethink his libertarianism. In a video interview titled "The Year That Broke America's Illusions," he went so far as to say that "libertarianism has been so distorted, I don't know if I have to pull my name out of that ring. It's been adopted by people who don't seem to hold the responsibility side of it and don't seem to hold the compassion side of it." He even likened not wearing masks to drunk driving.

As you can imagine, his comments sent shock waves through the libertarian movement. For many of us, trillions in wasted spending, contradictory guidance from public health officials, arbitrary school and business shutdowns, and absurd policies like closing beaches and outdoor dining have made us even more skeptical of government power.

Why did the 2016 election and the pandemic cause one of the best-known libertarians to seemingly go in the other direction?

I recently attended FreedomFest in Las Vegas, where Penn & Teller have a longstanding residency at the Rio Casino, and caught up with Penn on the set of his popular podcast Penn's Sunday School to talk about Donald Trump, COVID restrictions, and whether his view of the world has really changed. Also joining the conversation was Matt Donnelly, a cohost of Penn's Sunday School.

Over nearly two hours, I talked with Penn about Trump, COVID, Bob Dylan, and the $64,000 question: Has libertarianism changed—or has he?

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• The Reason Rundown with Peter Suderman. Free minds. Free markets. Big stories. That's The Reason Rundown, which comes out every Friday. End the week with concise, thought-provoking stories from the journalists at Reason, the magazine of logic, not legends; coherence, not contradictions. Hosted by Features Editor Peter Suderman, each episode he talks to a single Reason journalist about a single big story. Subscribe today.

The post Penn Jillette: Did His Libertarianism Survive Trump and COVID? appeared first on Reason.com.

No living American journalist has a fiercer reputation for independence—and invective—than Glenn Greenwald. The Pulitzer Prize winner helped break the Edward Snowden revelations, was once threatened with jail time by Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro, and was part of the team that launched The Intercept in 2014 before resigning six years later, claiming his colleagues were censoring his criticism of the Biden administration.

So what are we to make of the fact that Greenwald, once a contributing writer at Salon who appeared regularly on the left-wing news show Democracy Now!, is now a fixture on Fox News' Tucker Carlson Tonight? How do we explain the fact that Greenwald, known for his progressive critique of American foreign policy, is now welcomed in conservative circles but considered a pariah by many of his former colleagues on the left?

Has Glenn Greenwald changed, or has the world?

Reason's Nick Gillespie caught up with him in Las Vegas, where he was speaking at FreedomFest, an annual gathering of conservatives and libertarians. Greenwald was part of a roster this year that included Sen Rand Paul (R–Ky.), publisher Steve Forbes, former Education Secretary Betsy DeVos, and Project Veritas' James O'Keefe.

We talked about why he has no qualms about appearing on Carlson's show, why so much of the legacy and left-wing press is quick to apologize for state power, how the trans movement shows the limits of identity politics, and whether the state has any business regulating the internet via antitrust actions.

The post Glenn Greenwald: Tucker Carlson, Left-Wing Authoritarians, Identity Politics, and Free Speech appeared first on Reason.com.

"That's not funny!" is the cri de guerre of contemporary progressives, argues Noah Rothman in The Rise of the New Puritans. "No longer is the American left comfortable with hedonistic pursuits," writes the Commentary associate editor. "To the New Puritan, all society's engines must be harnessed to restore a lost paradise….Enchanting diversions and happy frivolities are distractions to be avoided or even forbidden."

In a deeply researched and wittily written book, Rothman explores the totalizing philosophy of the founders of Plymouth Plantation and Massachusetts Bay Colony and argues a similarly sour and single-minded utopianism undergirds contemporary left-wing attacks on standup comedy, ethnic food appropriation, professional sports, and other culture-war skirmishes.

Rothman is smart and funny and, just as he did in his previous book, Unjust: Social Justice and the Unmaking of America, argues in exceptionally good faith. This is a deep and wide-ranging conversation and there's no question that Rothman is definitely onto something. But why then, I ask him, are conservatives such drags, too?

Today's sponsors:

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• The Reason Speakeasy is a live, monthly, unscripted conversation with outspoken defenders of free thinking and heterodoxy in an age of cancel culture and thought police. Hosted by Nick Gillespie in New York City, the next one takes place on Wednesday, July 27, 2022 at The Sheen Center and features George Dawes Green, the founder of The Moth, the popular show and podcast that has redefined personal storytelling in the Internet Age. The author of three previous novels, Green's latest, The Kingdoms of Savannah, has just been published to rave reviews. Tickets are $10 and must be purchased online. Go here for details and here for previous installments of the Reason Speakeasy.

photo: Robin Rayne/ZUMAPRESS/Newscom

The post Noah Rothman: The Progressive War on Fun appeared first on Reason.com.

Dirty Pictures: How an Underground Network of Nerds, Feminists, Misfits, Geniuses, Bikers, Potheads, Printers, Intellectuals, and Art School Rebels Revolutionized Art and Invented Comix, by Reason Senior Editor Brian Doherty, tells the story of how people such as Robert Crumb, Trina Robbins, and Art Spiegelman redefined not just what comic books were capable of but what gets counted as art.

Beginning in the late 1950s and 1960s, the characters Doherty writes about shook up pop culture and the high art world, but they also fought for radical, creative, individualized expression in an age of figurative and literal censorship. In today's world of cancel culture and speech codes, there's a lot of lessons to be learned from their struggles. Nick Gillespie interviews Doherty about all that, plus his previous books such as This Is Burning Man: The Rise of a New American Underground and Radicals for Capitalism: A Freewheeling History of the Modern American Libertarian Movement. 

This episode of The Reason Interview was recorded in front of a live audience in New York City on Monday, June 20, 2022, as part of our Reason Speakeasy series, where we host monthly conversations about free speech, creative expression, and maverick thinking. Check out past episodes by going here and look for upcoming events here.

Today's sponsors:

• You probably take better care of your car than you do of your brain! Get a mental health check-up already! BetterHelp is an accessible and affordable source for professional, confidential counseling. BetterHelp assesses your needs and matches you with a licensed therapist to whom you can start talking in under 48 hours, all online. I've used the service myself and had a great experience with it. I'm happy to let you know that as a Reason Interview listener, you'll get 10 percent off your first month by visiting our sponsor at BetterHelp.com/TRI.
• The Reason Rundown with Peter Suderman. Free minds. Free markets. Big stories. That's The Reason Rundown, which comes out every Friday. End the week with concise, thought-provoking stories from the journalists at Reason, the magazine of logic, not legends; coherence, not contradictions. Hosted by Features Editor Peter Suderman, each episode he talks to a single Reason journalist about a single big story. Subscribe today.

The post Brian Doherty: From <i>MAD</i> Magazine to <i>Maus</i> appeared first on Reason.com.

As the most momentous Supreme Court term in recent memory comes to a close, are things better or worse for libertarians?

Georgetown Law's Randy Barnett is arguably the most important and influential libertarian legal scholar walking the planet today. Over the years, he's argued against Obamacare and for medical marijuana in front of the Supreme Court. In books like Restoring the Lost Constitution and The Structure of Liberty, he's developed the concept of what he calls "judicial engagement," or the idea that judges need to be more forceful in striking down laws that restrict rights guaranteed by the Constitution. At the same time, he's a powerful critic of liberal judicial activism where judges effectively create law out of ideological preference and he pushes back against conservative majoritarianism, which holds that legislatures can basically do whatever they want.

In a nearly two-hour-long conversation, I talk with Barnett about the Dobbs decision that struck down a women's right to an abortion, the Bruen decision that struck down a New York state law limiting the ability of gun owners to carry weapons, and other major rulings. We talk about the general direction of the Supreme Court and whether it's headed in a more—or less—libertarian direction. And we discuss the treatment of Ilya Shapiro, the former Cato staffer who was going to join Barnett at Georgetown until a controversy erupted over one of Shapiro's tweets.

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• The Reason Rundown with Peter Suderman. Free minds. Free markets. Big stories. That's The Reason Rundown. End the week with concise, thought-provoking stories from the journalists at Reason, the magazine of logic, not legends; coherence, not contradictions. Hosted by Features Editor Peter Suderman, each week he talks to a single Reason journalist about a single big story. Subscribe today.

The post Randy Barnett: Abortion, Guns, and the Future of the Supreme Court appeared first on Reason.com.

Is the Libertarian Party (LP) being "trumpified?" Or is it now—finally!—home to the second coming of the Ron Paul Revolution?

If you're a watcher of Reason's videos, you know that a few weeks ago, I went to Reno, Nevada, to cover the long-awaited, much-anticipated Libertarian Party national convention, where a group called the Mises Caucus took over the party by winning all the leadership positions. I'm joined today by Reason video producer Zach Weissmueller, who coordinated and directed our video coverage (here's a full playlist). 

Founded in 2017 by Michael Heise, the Mises Caucus has long pledged to "make the Libertarian Party libertarian again." Over the past several years, it's taken control of several dozen state parties. Caucus members call themselves the Ron Paul Revolution 2.0, stress the need for bolder messaging, and came to Reno promising to remove the party's longstanding pro-choice plank, push for less emphasis on open-borders-style immigration, and strip out platform language condemning "bigotry as irrational and repugnant" that dates back to 1974. They also stress that the L.P. national's response to Covid restrictions was far too timid and accommodating.

Critics of the Mises Caucus say the group is filled with shitposting edgelords who are tacking hard toward Trump fans, social conservatives, and even people with alt-right sympathies. They worry that the Mises Caucus takeover will be the end of the Libertarian Party.

For today's podcast, I talk with Zach about we saw in Reno, the often-heated response to Reason's coverage of the convention, and what the future not just of the L.P. but of the bigger libertarian movement looks like.

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The post Zach Weissmueller: Will the Mises Caucus Save or Kill the Libertarian Party? appeared first on Reason.com.

Bitcoin is trading under $23,000 as I write this, which means the value of the world's biggest cryptocurrency has lost about $45,000 per coin since last November, when it was at about $68,000.

Though the recent slide in the price of bitcoin has sent many speculators scrambling back to fiat currency, it's done nothing to cool the fervor of Robert Breedlove, a self-proclaimed freedom maximalist whose Twitter feed is filled with encomia for the inflation-proof monetary system that has a supply fixed via the consensus of a decentralized, global software network.

"Unlike the US Constitution," he writes, "#Bitcoin cannot be amended—that's why incorruptible money is a greater instrument of freedom than the US Constitution." "#Bitcoin," he predicts, "will prove to be history's ultimate example of the old adage 'when you can't beat them, join them.'"

The 36-year-old former hedge fund manager and accountant by training is a leading thinker and writer in the bitcoin space, where he publishes The Freedom Analects and hosts The "What is Money?" Show podcast and video series.

I talked with Breedlove at the Bitcoin 2022 conference in Miami this April about why bitcoin is the best hedge against hyperinflation, how Austrian economics informs his worldview, and why he believes bitcoin will inevitably become the basis of the global economy. "No one's figured out how to stop bitcoin, basically meaning turn it off," he says. "And so, if you can't turn it off, that effectively operates as this vortex of incentives. It's just incentivizing people to interact with it, to hold it, to save and build businesses on it."

The months between our conversation and today have not been kind to bitcoin, but Breedlove remains a stalwart defender, tweeting recently that "instead of focusing on price, just follow the energy," and pointing to a chart showing that bitcoin's hash rate—a measure of the total computational power being used on the network and thus a proxy for its health—has gone upward despite the price declines.

Today's sponsor:

• The Reason Speakeasy is a monthly, unscripted conversation in New York City with outspoken defenders of free thinking and heterodoxy in an age of cancel culture and thought police. On Monday, June 20, Nick Gillespie talks with legendary graphic designer Steven Heller and Reason Senior Editor Brian Doherty about the latter's new book, Dirty Pictures: How an Underground Network of Nerds, Feminists, Misfits, Geniuses, Bikers, Potheads, Printers, Intellectuals, and Art School Rebels Revolutionized Art and Invented Comix. The event takes place at Caveat, a bar and theater on the Lower East Side. Doors open at 6 p.m., program begins at 7 p.m. Tickets cost $10 and must be purchased ahead of time online. Details here.

The post Robert Breedlove: 'Just Follow the Energy' on Bitcoin, Not the Price appeared first on Reason.com.

In the late 1970s, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) famously—and controversially—defended the right of neo-Nazis to march through the Chicago suburb of Skokie, Illinois, which was home to many Holocaust survivors. It was a defining moment for the group and for the idea that free speech, no matter how vile, must be guaranteed to everyone.

But over the past 20 years—and especially over the past few years—the ACLU has seemingly retreated from its unwavering defense of free speech in favor of supporting progressive candidates and causes. It ran ads supporting Stacey Abrams in her gubernatorial campaign in Georgia, for instance. It's called for the forgiveness of $50,000 in student loan debt. It even ghostwrote and placed the Washington Post op-ed about domestic violence that led to Amber Heard losing a defamation case against Johnny Depp.

Its lack of focus on its traditional mission of defending free speech has gotten to a point where its former executive director, who led the group during the Skokie controversy, has become one of its biggest critics. "If the Skokie case happened again," Ira Glasser told me in 2020, "would the ACLU take it? I don't know."

But if the ACLU is retreating, another free speech group is expanding to fill the void left behind. Founded in 1999 to combat speech codes on college campuses, the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education—FIRE—has announced a new name and an expanded mission of defending free speech off-campus as well as on. 

The new name is the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression and the group has announced "a three-year, $75 million litigation, opinion research and public education campaign aimed at boosting and solidifying support for free-speech values." FIRE's longtime president is Greg Lukianoff, the co-author of the bestselling book The Coddling of the American Mind, and, as it happens, a former employee of the ACLU—a group for which he has lots of praise. 

In today's episode, he tells me about why he's concerned that support for what he calls the "culture of free speech"—broad-based belief in the value of tolerance and civil disagreement—has been declining for the better part of a decade and how FIRE is going to work to turn that around.

Today's sponsor:

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The post Greg Lukianoff: Saving the 'Culture of Free Speech' appeared first on Reason.com.

During the Cold War in America, about the two worst things you could be accused of was being a communist or a homosexual. In fact, people like FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover routinely conflated the two, asserting that the Soviet Union blackmailed gay diplomats, politicians, and citizens into betraying the United States. Despite no evidence of that, the federal government banned gay and lesbian employees, leading to all sorts of discriminatory and stupid behavior on the part of government officials and private actors. 

In the new book Secret City: The Hidden History of Gay Washington, James Kirchick explores how panic and hysteria over gays informed everything from the Alger Hiss trial to Lyndon Johnson's 1964 presidential campaign to Ronald Reagan's first run for governor of California and his two terms in the White House. 

Kirchick, a columnist at Tablet and a writer at large for Air Mail, also talks to me about a libertarian angle to all this too besides the government discriminating against people due to sexual orientation: Gay rights activists such as Randy Shilts, whose And The Band Played On was the first big history of the AIDS crisis, and Harvey Milk, the openly gay politician who was assassinated after being elected to the San Francisco Board of Supervisors, started out as ardent Barry Goldwater supporters. So did Young Americans for Freedom activist and former Rep. Robert Bauman (R–Md.), who lost his 1980 re-election bid after getting caught soliciting sex from a 16-year-old male prostitute.

"For gay men of this particular generation, of this particular political disposition, they were inclined towards libertarianism," Kirchick tells me. "They were inclined towards small government. Get off my back. That's what Barry Goldwater was was advertising in 1964."

We also talk about people like Frank Kameny, a federal employee who sued the government after getting fired simply for being gay, and how the gay rights movement is a powerful model for social and political change based on individual rights.

The post James Kirchick: How Homophobia Warped the Cold War appeared first on Reason.com.

Faisal Saeed Al Mutar and Melissa Chen are the outspoken, courageous co-founders of Ideas Beyond Borders (IBB), a nonprofit that translates books about pluralism, science, civil liberties, and critical thinking like John Stuart Mill's On Liberty and Steven Pinker's Enlightenment Now into Arabic and distributes them for free as e-books throughout the Middle East. They've also translated thousands of Wikipedia pages on the same topics and made them available to an audience desperately interested in new ways of thinking about culture, politics, and ideas.

Faisal left Iraq after extremists killed his brother and threatened his life, and Melissa was once a persona non grata in her native Singapore due to free speech activism. Founded in 2017, IBB is also funding underground girls schools in Afghanistan, actively helping Afghans find refuge from the Taliban, and running a campaign against censorship at endbannedbooks.org. Disclosure: I'm on the board of Ideas Beyond Borders.

This Reason Interview podcast was taped live on Monday, May 2, 2022, as part of the Reason Speakeasy series, held monthly in New York City. Go here for podcast and video versions of past events.

Today's sponsor:

• We have a health care problem in this country. The government is expanding its reach, ultimately seeking Medicare for All. Many of you are on healthcare.gov plans, and if you are, ditch it and try something new. CrowdHealth. CrowdHealth is not insurance. It's an alternative way to pay your health care bills. No surprise bills. No doctor networks. Health care can return to being between you and your doctor without government or health insurance interference. Check them out at joincrowdhealth.com, and enter promo code REASON to get $99/month for three months.

The post Faisal Saeed Al Mutar, Melissa Chen: Bringing Enlightenment Values to the Middle East appeared first on Reason.com.

What sorts of paintings will be hanging in the museums of the future?

Agnieszka Pilat is betting that we'll be looking at what she calls "heroic portraits of machines"—fine-art renderings of the technology that freed the modern world from the bone- and soul-crushing labor that our parents and grandparents endured.

Pilat's paintings—especially ones featuring Spot, Boston Dynamics' robot dog—are sought after by Silicon Valley collectors drawn to her valorization of technology, a welcome alternative to the traditional demonization by artists of the man-made world.

Her work is rich in callbacks to artists ranging from Leonardo da Vinci to Marcel Duchamp to Andy Warhol, and she incorporates augmented reality to further highlight how technology shapes our perceptions. A sure sign of success: One of her paintings appeared in The Matrix sequel released last year as a representation of future art.

Born in Poland in 1973, Pilat remembers life under communism as an extended period of conformity and repression that ended almost immediately after the communist regime collapsed in 1989. She talks about how her father, finally able to operate his own shop, stopped drinking and built a prosperous bakery business.

Pilat immigrated to the United States in the early 2000s. Landing in San Francisco, she encountered amazingly wealthy tech workers espousing the same collectivist ideas that had made her childhood so miserable. "I was just really shocked," she tells Reason. "I didn't realize that people still think that communism or socialism is a good idea. Moral outrage was growing within me and also a feeling that I need to protect America by telling people what it really means."

Shortly after arriving in the States, Pilat stumbled across the work of another Eastern European immigrant: Ayn Rand. Though she didn't become an Objectivist, Pilat responded viscerally to Rand's insistence that "you have a right and a moral obligation to yourself to have a purpose and work towards the purpose as hard as you can."

As her work gains stature, Pilat is moving on to a new frontier, if not quite the final one: She's an artist in residence at Elon Musk's SpaceX, where she is looking forward to possibly producing "superheroic portraits" of machines in zero gravity.

I talked with her in her New York studio about being upstaged by a robot dog, why she wants everyone to remember what communism was really like, and how to best appreciate—and protect—the economic and cultural freedom we too often take for granted.

The post Agnieszka Pilat: 'I Didn't Realize People Still Think Socialism Is a Good Idea.' appeared first on Reason.com.

I'm excited to share a special bonus episode of The Reason Interview with Nick Gillespie. It's a debate about forgiving student loan, debt organized and produced by the good folks at Intelligence Squared US, America's leading platform for fair, balanced, informed debate on all the leading issues of the day. I've been involved with them for years, including participating in debates on drug legalization, Medicare for All, Net Neutrality, and today's show about student loans (which originally took place in March 2021).

In the interests of transparency, you should know that this is a paid promotion. But I'm happy to share this Intelligence Squared US debate not just because I'm one of the debaters, but because it's modeling exactly what we need more of: deeply informed and civil arguments over what sorts of policies we need to help make our country the best it can be.

They're doing great stuff over at Intelligence Squared by bringing reason and passion to controversial topics and presenting all sides fairly and creatively. The debates are done "Oxford style," which means the winner is the team that persuades more people to its side. That adds drama and excitement to each debate.

The moderator is John Donvan, a legendary, award-winning journalist who doesn't let anyone get away with cheap shots or slippery language. I always learn a ton, whether I'm just listening to or participating in one of the debates. It's a terrific series that reaches back years and covers just about every topic you can imagine and you can access it all by subscribing to their podcast feed or by going over to their website, where they also have video and a ton of links and supporting materials so you can do your own research and come to your own conclusions.

And now, without further ado, here's a great debate from Intelligence Squared, Should We Forgive Student Debt? If you want to check out the video version, transcript, and background about all the participants, go here.

The post Should We Forgive Student Debt? appeared first on Reason.com.

My guest today is Alex Epstein, the author of Fossil Future: Why Global Human Flourishing Requires More Oil, Coal, and Natural Gas—Not Less.

Two basic beliefs frequently circulate today: First, that fossil fuels are causing imminent global catastrophe and, second, that renewable energy sources (especially solar and wind) can supply all our energy needs either right now or in the very near future.

Epstein says that both of those points are wrong. He believes that fossil fuels have contributed to a warming global climate system but argues that they give us more and more mastery over the environment and their renewable replacements can't scale up to fulfill our needs. Humans, he says, are flourishing like never before precisely because oil, gas, and coal allow us to withstand a world that is very inhospitable to our living here. Wind and solar make up just 3 percent of all energy right now and forcing a fast-paced shift to renewables, he argues, would consign billions of people to poverty or death in order to stave off the impact of man-made climate change, the consequences of which have often been exaggerated and with which humans are equipped to deal. 

In this wide-ranging conversation, Epstein discusses how he came to his views, how he fought an attempted hit piece in The Washington Post by using social media, why Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) corporate rules are troubling, and how Ayn Rand influences his thinking.

The post Alex Epstein: Why the Future Needs More Fossil Fuels appeared first on Reason.com.

Back in April, I attended Bitcoin 2022, held in Miami, where I spoke with today's guest, who is the CEO of the publicly traded company that owns more bitcoin than any other. 

Can you guess which company that is? 

It's not Tesla, Square, or Coinbase. 

It's MicroStrategy, which is based in Virginia and provides business intelligence, mobile software, and cloud computing. It owns about 2 1/2 times as much bitcoin as the next closet company, which would be Tesla. 

The reason MicroStrategy is so long on bitcoin is because its 57-year-old billionaire CEO, Michael Saylor, had an epiphany in 2020, when COVID-19 had shut down most of the country. Bitcoin, he tells me, "is an approximation of a perfect monetary system because it is correct. It has no inflation in it. It's not corruptible because it's decentralized." He believes bitcoin is the last, best hope of creating an economy that is independent of the machinations of politics, central banks, and connected investors who rig the system to benefit themselves at the expense of regular people.

While the economy tanked due to external factors, Saylor directed MicroStrategy to keep buying bitcoin regardless of the price. The company is committed to "hodling" for the long term, a position Saylor believes in now more than ever as inflation takes hold. 

And he's still saying that today, even as bitcoin has slid down to just $31,000 as I write this—down from its peak of almost $68,000 last November. Saylor's Twitter account is a beauty to behold, with him recently quoting Oliver Wendell Holmes to the effect that "youth fades; love droops; the leaves of friendship fall; A mother's secret hope outlives them all" and posting a picture of him working at a McDonald's saying it's "time to get back to work."

So bitcoin's bear market is actually a perfect time to release my interview with him from Miami in April, where he explains why he's all in on bitcoin, how his training as an engineer informs his worldview, and his belief that one thing holding back the mass adoption of a non-state-backed currency is a lack of clarity in how the U.S. government will regulate it.

Today's sponsor is Better Help, a licensed, online therapy service. Click here to get 10 percent off your first month as a Reason Interview listener.

Here's the video version of Reason's interview with Michael Saylor. Subscribe to our YouTube channel and receive automatic notifications when new videos go live.

The post Will Bitcoin Billionaire Investor Michael Saylor End up at McDonald's? appeared first on Reason.com.

The leaked draft of a Supreme Court opinion by Associate Justice Samuel Alito overturning Roe v. Wade (1973) and Planned Parenthood v. Casey (1992) has sent shock waves throughout America, with pro-choice and pro-life advocates scrambling to figure out what happens next if the right to an abortion is withdrawn at the federal level. "Roe was egregiously wrong from the start," wrote Alito in February. "We hold that Roe and Casey must be overruled."

While there's no question whether the document is authentic (Chief Justice John Roberts says it is), many questions remain. First and foremost among them: Does the draft, written up in response to Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization, a case challenging Mississippi's ban on abortions after 15 weeks, represent the current thinking of the Court's majority? We won't know for sure until a ruling is released sometime before the end of June. 

What's the best way to think about abortion rights, Roe v. Wade, and Alito's arguments from a libertarian perspective? I spoke with constitutional scholar Josh Blackman, a professor at South Texas College of Law Houston, an adjunct scholar at the Cato Institute, and a blogger at The Volokh Conspiracy. Blackman is an unabashed admirer of Alito's draft, writing that it "meticulously dissects, and forcefully responds to, every conceivable position in favor of retaining Roe and Casey."

I'm not convinced about that at all and, in a wide-ranging conversation about the history of abortion and "fundamental rights," the changing nature of the Supreme Court, federalism, and partisan politics, we go deep on whether returning decisions about abortion to the states will increase or decrease individual liberty. This is an important discussion about a topic that will likely dominate politics for months to come.

Today's sponsors include:

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The post Josh Blackman: Sam Alito, <i>Roe v. Wade</i>, and Libertarians appeared first on Reason.com.

Wikipedia, "the free encyclopedia that anyone can edit," went from being a weird online experiment 21 years ago to one of the mainstays of the modern internet with astonishing speed. Even more astonishing, it has maintained its reputation and functionality since its founding, even as the rest of the social internet seems hellbent on tearing itself apart.

As Twitter, Facebook, and others are consumed with controversy over moderation, governance, and the definition of free speech, Wikipedia continues to quietly grow in utility, trustworthiness, and comprehensiveness. There are now nearly 6.5 million articles on the English version alone, and it has held its place in the top 15 most-visited sites on the internet for well over a decade.

Reason Editor in Chief Katherine Mangu-Ward spoke with Wikipedia's Jimmy Wales, about what he got right—and what he's worried about as politicians all around the globe are pushing for more control of online content.

A key ingredient to Wikipedia's success, says Wales, is its high degree of decentralization. After this interview was conducted, Elon Musk made a bid to buy Twitter, bringing new salience to the battle over who controls the flow of information (and disinformation) online.

The post Jimmy Wales: What Wikipedia Got Right About Social Media appeared first on Reason.com.

Meet Aella, the daughter of evangelical Christians from Idaho who were so poor they couldn't always put food on the table.

A former factory worker who never graduated college, she became one of the most successful performers on the adult subscription site OnlyFans, sometimes taking home over $100,000 a month on the platform. She still does one-on-one appointments but only with clients who can afford to pay her current rate of $3,000 an hour.

These days, Aella is known for her forays into data science, oddball social media polls, sexy and silly personal moments on Twitter, and using her giant platform to spread hot libertarian takes, such as declaring, "I like capitalism."

"I am not okay with you making laws that prevent me from doing what I feel is good for me," Aella tells Reason. An outspoken defender of sex worker rights, she compares her current life to what it was like at the age of 19, when she would wake up at 4:30 a.m. to go do repetitive tasks on an assembly line in a windowless factory, often putting in over 50 hours a week.

"Why do people talk about survival sex work but not like…survival factory work or survival burger flipping?" she wonders. Yes, there's exploitation in sex work, but "decriminalizing sex work would let workers actually go get police help if they needed it."

Even before she got rich and famous, back when she was "scraping change off the ground to eat," Aella says she still "had libertarian-leaning economic views."

Reason's Liz Wolfe met up with Aella at her home in Austin, Texas, for a wide-ranging conversation about everything from how sex work made her a better data scientist to why many successful practitioners in her industry are selling not only sex but also the personal connections that so many of us are missing in our lives.

Today's sponsor:

• CrowdHealth is an alternative way to pay for your health care with no surprise bills and no doctor networks. Use the promo code REASON and get three months for just $99 a month.

The post Aella: Libertarian Sex Worker Turned Data Scientist appeared first on Reason.com.

Colorado's Jared Polis might be the most libertarian governor in America, at a time when his big-state Democratic colleagues are getting exposed as hypocrites while presiding over historic population declines or getting kicked out of office for sexual harassment and sending COVID infected patients back to nursing homes and then lying about it. I'm not sure that Polis' 2014 claim in the pages of Reason that "libertarians should vote for Democratic candidates" because they're "more supportive of individual liberty and freedom" has held up, but he's certainly leading by example.

The 46-year-old governor is presiding over one of the fastest-growing states in the country and a place that has one of the lowest death rates during the pandemic. He pushed back against members of his own party to remove mask mandates, and he consistently argued that public health decisions should be made at as local a level as possible. Last fall, at a conference held by the conservative Steamboat Institute, he declared that the state income tax rate "should be zero" and has supported ballot initiatives that reduced the rate. Polis has embraced occupational licensing reform and was an outspoken defender of bitcoin back in 2014 when Sen. Joe Manchin (D–W.Va.) called on then-head of the Federal Reserve Janet Yellen to ban it.

The openly gay, married father of two recently signed a free-range parenting bill that effectively relegalizes the sort of Colorado childhood he recalls as the son of two ex-hippie parents: "Just because a kid is playing alone outside, it doesn't mean they're in danger," Polis said at the signing ceremony. "It will help decrease false reports so…we can focus on the serious and the real instances of child abuse."

As conservative states pass laws strictly limiting abortions, he signed legislation guaranteeing a woman's right to choose. The founder of two charter schools, he is an outspoken advocate for school choice, saying earlier this year that "public school choice is an asset to improve all public schools." A former tech entrepreneur and five-term congressman, Polis is steadfast against limiting speech rights or treating social media platforms as utilities that can't moderate content or bounce users for transgressing terms of service.

In a wide-ranging conversation with Reason, Polis talks about trying to govern from the middle, takes shots at President Joe Biden's moves on free trade and immigration, and repeats his argument that libertarians should vote for Democrats. Up for re-election in the fall and a heavy favorite to win a second term, Polis also discusses his political ambitions as a rising star in a party that is expected to get blown out in the midterm elections.

The post Jared Polis: The Most Libertarian Governor in America? appeared first on Reason.com.

On October 4, 2020, when COVID-19 was raging, American schools were mostly shuttered, and vaccines were believed to be years away—a team of top researchers at the world's most prestigious universities, including Stanford's Jay Bhattacharya, Harvard's Martin Kulldorff, and Oxford's Sunetra Gupta—published the Great Barrington Declaration, a controversial open letter challenging the official U.S. response of lockdowns and government control of ever-larger parts of the economy and everyday life.

Recognizing that COVID overwhelmingly affected elderly Americans and others with specific, identifiable health conditions, they called for a policy of "focused protection," in which the vulnerable would be kept safe and the rest of us, especially children and young adults, would be able to get on with our lives.

The response at the very highest levels of government was quick and draconian. Francis Collins, then the director of the National Institutes of Health, wrote a private email to Anthony Fauci, which was later obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request, denouncing Bhattacharya, Kulldorff, and Gupta as "fringe epidemiologists" who deserved to be the subject of a media "takedown."

"Big tech outlets like Facebook and Google followed suit, suppressing our ideas, falsely deeming them 'misinformation,' says Bhattacharya, a professor of medicine at Stanford who also holds a Ph.D. in economics. "I started getting calls from reporters asking me why I wanted to 'let the virus rip,' when I had proposed nothing of the sort. I was the target of racist attacks and death threats."

I sat down with Bhattacharya to talk about what it was like to be at the very center of an official effort to suppress heterodox thinking about the pandemic, why he believes he and his Great Barrington Declaration co-authors have been vindicated, and whether the public health establishment can ever recover from ongoing revelations of incompetence, malfeasance, and politically motivated decision-making. He also discusses how the centralization of science funding encourages dangerous groupthink, why he believes in mRNA vaccines but remains staunchly anti-mandate, and why he stopped wearing masks a long time ago.

The post Dr. Jay Bhattacharya: How To Avoid 'Absolutely Catastrophic' COVID Mistakes appeared first on Reason.com.

In a world where drug legalization efforts are on the march and the pernicious effects of drug prohibition on criminal justice, education, foreign policy, and racial and ethnic communities are being scrutinized like never before, Columbia neuroscientist Carl Hart is breaking bold new ground on how we think about drug policy, substance use and abuse, and individual freedom.

"The Declaration of Independence guaranteed life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness for all of us, as long as we don't disrupt anybody else's ability to do the same," says the author of Drug Use for Grown-Ups: Chasing Liberty in the Land of Fear. "That means we get to live our life as we choose, as we see fit. Taking drugs is a part of that for a lot of Americans." 

He writes that his use of drugs—including heroin—helps him be a better person. "I do not have a drug-use problem," he declares. "Never have. Each day, I meet my parental, personal, and professional responsibilities. I pay my taxes, serve as a volunteer in my community…and contribute to the global community as an informed and engaged citizen."

Nick Gillespie talks with Hart about all that, his path-breaking research on addiction, why he turned from an ardent supporter of the drug war to one of its leading critics, elitism within the legalization movement, and how he talks with his kids and his students about responsible drug use.

This Reason Interview podcast was taped live on Monday, April 4, 2022, as part of the Reason Speakeasy series, held monthly in New York City. Go here for podcast and video versions of past events.

Today's sponsors include:

• The Novus Society at Donors Trust, which is helping Americans under 40 help create a freer, better world through targeted, effective philanthropy.
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The post Carl Hart: Legalize All Drugs Now! appeared first on Reason.com.

In 2019, Jeff Kosseff published The Twenty-Six Words that Created the Internet, the definitive "biography" of the controversial law known as Section 230. Part of the 1996 Communications Decency Act, Section 230 grants broad immunity to websites and internet service providers from legal actions based on user-generated content. Section 230 enabled the participatory nature of the web, from YouTube videos to Yelp reviews to basically all of Twitter. It's the reason why Reason can't be sued for libelous or defamatory content posted in our comments section (though the authors of such comments can be).

Now Kosseff, who teaches cybersecurity law at the United States Naval Academy, is back with The United States of Anonymous: How the First Amendment Shaped Online Speech. His new book looks at the history of and controversy surrounding anonymous speech and activism.

Before becoming a law professor, Kosseff worked as a journalist at The Oregonian, where he was a finalist for a Pulitzer Prize and a winner of the George Polk Award. Nick Gillespie talks with him about why he thinks anonymous speech is generally a good thing but getting harder to maintain, why Democrats and Republicans alike keep freaking out over Section 230, and how his past as a journalist informs his interest in protecting freedom of speech and assembly.

The post Jeff Kosseff: Why Anonymous Speech Is Good—and Constitutional appeared first on Reason.com.

"I am a professional rememberer," writes Nathan Rabin in The Joy of Trash. "It is my duty to remember not just for my own but for society."

Rabin is really taking one for the team here, especially since his new book accurately bills itself as the "definitive guide to the very worst of everything." Among the godawful things he explicates are Academy Award-winning actress Joan Crawford's bizzare and patently false 1971 lifestyle guide, My Way of Life; the misbegotten Brady Bunch Variety Hour, which improbably included numerous "water ballet" routines along with endless dad jokes; cocaine-addicted movie producer Robert Evans' 1981 court-ordered, star-studded, anti-drug TV special Get High on Yourself; and the entirety of billionaire Mike Bloomberg's 2020 presidential candidacy.

Rabin was the headwriter for The A.V. Club for two decades and the inventor of the popular-but-controversial term "Manic Pixie Dreamgirl" to describe a recurring film character who "exists solely in the fevered imaginations of sensitive writer-directors to teach broodingly soulful young men to embrace life and its infinite mysteries and adventures." He now runs his own website, Nathan Rabin's Happy Place, where he sifts through all manner of cultural detritus with endless wit and energy. He also co-hosts Travolta/Cage, a podcast about "the greatest actors in history."

The 45-year-old Rabin talks with Nick Gillespie about how his Gen X roots inform his appreciation for and critique of consumer culture. Kids his age, he explains, learned early on through D.A.R.E. and transparently phony TV shows that adults and other authorities were often lying. Gen X came of age in the 1990s, he says, a time when the belief that technology would make everything perfect was widespread, an optimism severely tested both by the bursting of the tech bubble and the 9/11 attacks. "Irony and satire and comedy," he says, "can bring light to a very dark situation, and it can be very cathartic being able to laugh at things that you're not supposed to laugh about or being able to laugh about things that are incredibly dark."

Rabin also discusses how musician Grimes, who had a widely covered relationship and two children with billionaire Elon Musk, is reclaiming—or perhaps satirizing—the manic pixie dream girl trope and why Weird Al Yankovic, the subject of a good deal of his writing, has had a career far longer than most of the people he parodies.

Watch the video version of this interview here.

• Today's sponsor is Better Help online therapy. Are you feeling stresssed out, run down, anxious, short-tempered? Take the time to take care of yourself and start talking to a licensed therapist who won't judge you but will listen and help you with your problems, whatever they are. Better Help is cheaper than most traditional forms of therapy and lets you talk with your therapist via chat, phone, or video—all within 48 hours of signing up and without the hassles of in-person appointments. Go here and get 10 percent off your first month.
• Attention, New York City metro-area listeners: Come out on Monday, April 4, to see a live taping of The Reason Interview With Nick Gillespie featuring Columbia neuroscientist Carl Hart, author of Drug Use for Grown-Ups: Chasing Liberty in the Land of Fear. Doors open at 6 p.m. at Caveat Theater and Bar, 21-A Clinton Street in Manhattan's Lower East Side. Tickets cost $10. Go to reason.com/events for details.

The post Nathan Rabin: Why Gen X Is Super Media-Literate appeared first on Reason.com.

Do you want to build a rocket ship but don't have the deep pockets of Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, and Richard Branson?

You might want to turn to the Rocket Factory, "a trans-dimensional manufacturing plant" created by artist Tom Sachs, in which you can build and own a personalized rocket in both the physical and virtual worlds. The project is one of the most inventive uses of NFTs, a groundbreaking technology that makes digital items one-of-a-kind by giving them a unique code that can't be duplicated or forged. Sachs' Rocket Factory stands at the intersection of crypto, the metaverse, and the persistent human longing for the new frontier. You choose your components and create a unique rocket online that gets minted as an NFT. Sachs builds a meatspace replica and launches it and you decide what happens next to the spent rocket: He can mail it to you, donate it to a museum, or shred it for you.

Sachs' project makes use of the Ethereum blockchain, the shared public database that makes it possible to prove that you and you alone own a particular NFT; of the metaverse, the 3D virtual world to which a great deal of human interaction may soon migrate; and of our persistent longing for the new frontier, which is what John F. Kennedy talked about when announcing his space program in 1961. all of which are characteristics of what is often referred to as web3—the next phase in the evolution of the internet.

Nick Gillespie spoke with Sachs in his studio in Manhattan's Soho neighborhood to learn about the role of psychedelics in his creative process, how the internet has radically flattened and improved the relationship between artist and audience, and why his meticulously handcrafted NFT rockets can be just as exciting, innovative, and inspiring as the ones made by Bezos, Musk, and Branson.

• Today's episode is sponsored by the Donors Trust's Novus Society, a community of givers under 40 actively building their charitable investment account.
• Attention, New York City metro-area listeners: Come out on Monday, April 4, to see a live taping of The Reason Interview With Nick Gillespie featuring Columbia neuroscientist Carl Hart, author of Drug Use for Grown-Ups: Chasing Liberty in the Land of Fear. Doors open at 6 p.m. at Caveat Theater and Bar, 21-A Clinton Street in Manhattan's Lower East Side. Tickets cost $10. Go to reason.com/events for details.

The post Tom Sachs: Taking NFTs Where No Man Has Gone Before appeared first on Reason.com.

"If you're not living in a culture that has room for 'thought crime,' then you're not living in a culture that is growing," says Mike Solana. "You're not living in a culture that has the potential to progress in an exciting and—I want to say utopian—a positive direction."

Solana is a vice president at Peter Thiel's Founders Fund, a venture capital firm that has backed a ton of companies that you probably know well, from home-sharing platform Airbnb to payment processor Stripe. He's also a feisty online presence who's an outspoken critic of what he sees as the moralizing strain present in today's tech journalism.

Solana writes a Substack called Pirate Wires that offers perceptive commentary on the role of technology in politics and culture (a recent entry is titled "Social Media's Slow March to Oblivion") and his Twitter feed is a must-read.

Earlier this year in Miami, he organized Hereticon, which was billed as a "conference for thought crime" and focused on ideas and arguments that have largely been shut out of mainstream discourse. Guest host Peter Suderman talks with Solana about ideological tribalism, how the media can be an agent of distrust, and what he sees as the limitations of libertarian thinking when it comes to dealing with things like Russia's invasion of Ukraine.

The post Mike Solana: 'Thought Crime' Is Essential to Progress appeared first on Reason.com.

This week's Reason Interview was recorded in front of a audience at New York's Caveat theater, the first in a monthly series of Reason Speakeasy events in which I talk with guests known for their commitments to heterodox thinking, free expression, and open debate.

I interviewed the only writer—living, dead, or likely ever to be born—who has been favorably compared to Norman Mailer and Roseanne Barr. Laura Kipnis is a professor emerita of film and journalism at Northwestern who survived a ridiculous disciplinary hearing when graduate students (not in her class!) filed a Title IX complaint charging they felt unsafe after she published an essay in The Chronicle of Higher Education about "sexual paranoia" on campuses (she wrote about that in 2017's Unwanted Advances).

Her new book, Love in the Time of Contagion: A Diagnosis, explores the effects of COVID-19 on personal relationships in a wide variety of settings. How will it change our ideas of romance, commitment, and sexuality? How has it intensified already boiling generational resentments among boomers, Gen Xers, millennials, and Gen Zers? Why exactly did we let governments structure all aspects of our lives, even the most intimate ones, for so long?

We talk about how the "sexual paranoia" she once saw largely confined to universities has escaped the college campus and now infiltrates workplaces. How do the widely acknowledged repulsive physical appearances of bad actors like Harvey Weinstein, former President Donald Trump, and Jeffrey Toobin condition our reactions to their behaviors, which range from criminal to merely disgusting? Why has intergenerational desire been demonized even when people acting on it speak out in its defense? And why has the blossoming and acceptance of a seemingly infinite number of gender identities and sexual orientations not brought the liberation that was promised?

This is a rollicking, rich, and ribald conversation that goes to the heart of human relationships in a post-COVID world.

Photo Credit: Chris Sweda/TNS/Newscom

The post Laura Kipnis: How COVID Supercharged the #MeToo Movement appeared first on Reason.com.

Should the United States do more to support Ukraine in its fight against Russian invaders? Will financial sanctions against Russia work and are they moral? What does a libertarian foreign policy predicated on "realism and restraint" look like?

Today's guest on The Reason Interview is Will Ruger, the newly appointed president of the American Institute for Economic Research (AIER), who holds a Ph.D. in politics specializing in foreign policy. He's a veteran of the war in Afghanistan and was a prominent voice in calling for U.S. withdrawal. Ruger was nominated to be ambassador to that country late in the Trump administration (his confirmation was never brought to a vote).

He's a proponent of what he calls "libertarian realism" when it comes to foreign policy, meaning that America's interventions abroad should be focused on defending a narrowly defined national interest and that the use of military force should be strictly subjugated to diplomacy. Ruger is skeptical that the United States can or should play a leading role in defending Ukraine and he doesn't think sanctions are likely to accomplish anything, especially in the short run.

We talk about all that, how NATO, the European Union, and China figure into current events, and what he plans to do as the head of AIER, one of the oldest free market think tanks in the country.

The post Will Ruger: How Libertarians Should Think About Ukraine Invasion appeared first on Reason.com.

Is libertarianism a specifically political philosophy whose only legitimate concern is the role of the state and its use of force vis a vis the people it rules?

Or does libertarianism, properly understood, also entail a variety of cultural commitments that range far beyond arguments over the size, scope, and spending of government?

To put it slightly differently: Can you really be a libertarian in the streets but an authoritarian or progressive in the sheets? 

That's the starting point of "Two Libertarianisms," a trenchant essay by Stephanie Slade that appears in the April 2022 issue of Reason (subscribe!). She's a senior editor at Reason and a student of the libertarian movement's often fractious relationships with conservatives and religion.

For today's Reason Interview, I talk with her about "thick" vs. "thin" libertarians, her background in political polling and growing up in the great state of Florida, and her ideas about the compatibility between Roman Catholicism and libertarianism.

The post Stephanie Slade: What Kind of Libertarian Are You? appeared first on Reason.com.

In Free Speech: A History from Socrates to Social Media, the Danish activist and scholar Jacob Mchangama argues there has always been a tension between "elite speech" and "egalitarian speech" and that today's battles over Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter are the latest in a long line of attempts by the powerful to silence the masses.

The 43-year-old founder of the think tank Justitia tells me how the "Danish cartoon controversy" intensified his commitment to free speech, why hate speech laws empower authoritarians and hurt the people they are designed to protect, and why he's optimistic that the current global "free speech recession" will be eventually be beaten back.

The post Jacob Mchangama: How Hate Speech Laws Punish Minorities appeared first on Reason.com.

Though he's black and proud of it, libertarian school-choice activist Chris Stewart isn't celebrating Black History Month this February.

Instead, he's pushing what he calls "Uncomfortable History Month," or an embrace of teaching the past in all its contradictions, hypocrisies, and triumphs. At his Substack, a free mind, he tells the story of Mary Turner, a 21-year-old pregnant woman who was lynched in Georgia in 1918 for daring to protest the lynching of her own husband. When a statue honoring Turner was erected in 2010, vandals shot it up.

Turner's story is the sort of brutal incident whose telling is threatened by nearly 90 proposed local and state education laws—Stewart calls them "gag orders"—that would ban schools from teaching the grisly particulars of American history, including state-sanctioned and state-tolerated violence against racial, sexual, and other minorities. The former Minneapolis* school board member and current head of school-choice organization brightbeam has a radical vision for educational reform in which public funding follows K-12 students and parents freely choose among public, private, secular, and religious institutions that would teach radically different curricula.

That vision flows directly from Stewart's libertarian philosophy: The "cardinal rule is that the rights of individuals will not be infringed upon by anyone." He fears that the enormous advantage handed to reformers in the wake of the failed K-12 response to COVID-19 lockdowns is being squandered on culture war battles that have more to do with helping Republicans get elected by denouncing Critical Race Theory than with fundamentally changing the way schools work.

In a wide-ranging discussion, we talk about the failure of the libertarian movement to win over blacks, Hispanics, and other minorities who should rally to our critique of state power and support for criminal justice reform. Stewart also details his problems with the progressive left, how he moved from Ralph Nader to Jesse Ventura to libertarianism, and why he thinks laws criminalizing speech are always and everywhere wrong. He discusses the origins and aims for Eight Black Hands, his weekly podcast featuring conservative, liberal, progressive, and libertarian black men talking about public education and private responsibility. 

Today's sponsor is The Long Time Academy, a podcast about being a better ancestor.

*CORRECTION: The original version of this article misidentified Stewart as a former member of the St. Paul, Minnesota school board.

The post Chris Stewart Wants February To Be 'Uncomfortable History Month' appeared first on Reason.com.

On today's show, I talk with writer Kat Rosenfield, whose new mystery novel No One Will Miss Her has been nominated for an Edgar Allan Poe award, the highest honor in that genre.

She also authored a fantastic recent essay for Reason about the immense cultural staying power of The Matrix, the 1999 movie that introduced the concept of being red-pilled, or made aware of the dark ways the world and power really work. "It's hard to overstate the long-tail impact of The Matrix on popular and political culture," she writes. "It has left a vast imprint on everything from action movies to fashion to how we understand technology."

We talk about No One Will Miss Her, The Matrix, and the raging controversy she's found herself in after going on CNN to critique legacy media's attacks on podcaster Joe Rogan for spreading misinformation about Covid-19. Despite her critical comments about the way CNN and other outlets were demonizing Spotify and podcasting, rabid and profane Rogan fans started attacking Rosenfield as if she was sticking up for old media.

the folks who are still outraged about my CNN bit are uh really sending their best pic.twitter.com/NBgKxS8rrt

— Kat Rosenfield (@katrosenfield) February 2, 2022

The result is a dark—even dank—look at how rapidly discourse degenerates on social media. And a fun, rollicking conversation about if and when public discourse is going to improve any time soon.

Today's sponsors include The Long Time Academy, a podcast about being a better ancestor, and Better Help, a licensed, online therapy service (click here to get 10 percent off your first month as a Reason Interview listener).

The post Kat Rosenfield: Meet Joe Rogan's Dumbest Fans appeared first on Reason.com.

2021 was "the year of school choice, and we're just getting started," says Corey DeAngelis, national director of research at the American Federation for Children and a leading advocate for school choice.

The disruption to schooling caused by COVID-19, demands by teacher unions for more money and less accountability, and the mounting frustration of parents over everything from failed attempts at distance learning to medically dubious mask mandates have created the greatest opportunity for radical K-12 education reform in American history. Last year, 18 states either expanded or created new school-choice options, from publicly funded charter schools to education savings accounts to voucher programs. The percentage of households saying they are homeschooling their kids more than doubled from 5.4 percent in 2020 to 11.1 percent in 2021.

I talked with DeAngelis about what reforms have already been passed, what fixes are coming next, and what barriers need to be smashed in order to deliver on the promise of a quality, individualized education for every kid in the country. We discussed why he is against state-level laws banning Critical Race Theory (CRT) and other controversial pedagogies, why he believes Republicans are the party of school choice, and why he thinks parents should lobby state legislatures rather than local school boards if they want real choice for their kids.

This episode is supported by The Long Time Academy, a new podcast about how to be a good ancestor. It's a show about time, and how we think about time. The Long Time Academy is an audio documentary, but it also includes with practical exercises designed to expand your sense of time and help you be a good ancestor. Search for The Long Time Academy anywhere you listen to podcasts. Life is short. Time is long. The Long Time Academy.

The post Corey DeAngelis: 2021 Was 'the Year of School Choice,' But 2022 Will Be Even Better appeared first on Reason.com.

The history of censorship in the United States is a long and ugly one—and far from over. It's also a deeply ironic tale, with seemingly successful attempts to stamp out unwanted expression ultimately giving way to more and more freedom of speech.

In The Mind of the Censor and the Eye of the Beholder, legendary First Amendment lawyer Robert Corn-Revere documents how attempts by legendary censors such as Anthony Comstock (the head of the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice, whose name became synonymous with priggishness), Fredric Wertham (the communist-friendly psychiatrist whose crusade against comic books changed the publishing industry), and Newton Minow (the sainted FCC chairman who memorably—and incorrectly—denounced television as a "vast wasteland") ended up creating backlashes that undermined their attempts to control what Americans could read, watch, and listen to.

Corn-Revere tells me that although no one cops to being a censor these days, attempts to delegitimate the First Amendment are everywhere around us, especially when it comes to limiting speech in the name of supposedly protecting the feelings of religious, ethnic, and sexual minorities. "If you look at the history of this, you find it is the protection of individuals' speech rights that has made all of the mass movements by minorities and previously marginalized people possible," says Corn-Revere. "There wouldn't have been a gay rights movement or a women's movement. Certainly the civil rights movement was a defining time for protecting the speech of individuals."

He also talks about worrying shifts away from robust defenses of the First Amendment among Millennials and Gen Z, why every plan to put elected officials in charge of speech would be worse than trusting the relatively unregulated marketplace of ideas, and why he's ultimately optimistic about the future of free expression.

The post Bob Corn-Revere: How Today's Censors Hide Behind Science and Psychology appeared first on Reason.com.

On December 17, 2021, San Francisco Mayor London Breed declared a state of emergency in the city's Tenderloin district, which will lead to an increased police presence in the epicenter of the city's growing homelessness and addiction crisis. 

"It is time for the reign of criminals to end," she said in a press conference. "It comes to an end when we are more aggressive with law enforcement & less tolerant of all the BULLSHIT that has destroyed our city." It was a sharp turnaround for Breed, who after the murder of George Floyd in 2020 called for "ending the use of police in responding to non-criminal activity."

Breed was roundly criticized by progressive politicians and groups like the Coalition on Homelessness, who castigated the move as an "expansion of strategies that have been tried and failed" that would contribute to the "instability and poor public health outcomes" of people living on the streets. 

Michael Shellenberger, the author of the controversial new book San Fransicko: Why Progressives Ruin Cities, has called Mayor Breed's new "tough love" approach a "big step in the right direction." Better known as a pro-nuclear-power environmentalist, Shellenberger appeared on The Reason Interview in July 2020 to discuss his book Apocalypse Never: Why Environmental Alarmism Hurts Us All.

Today, Shellenberger talks with guest host Zach Weissmueller about the homelessness crisis in America's big cities, which the environmentalist says is actually an addiction-and-mental-health crisis enabled by progressive policies that permit open-air drug scenes on public property, prevent police from enforcing the law, and undermine the creation of a functional mental health system. Zach talks with Shellenberger about his foray into social policy, his critiques of both progressive and libertarian politics, and how he thinks America's big cities can clean up their streets without grossly violating civil liberties.

The post Michael Shellenberger: How Progressives Ruined American Cities appeared first on Reason.com.

"About three times as many Europeans leave their homelands and immigrate to the United States every year as the other way around," reports David Harsanyi. Yet "a growing number of American elites—politicians, academics, pundits, journalists, among others—argue, with increasing popularity, that we should look across the Atlantic for solutions to our most pressing problems." Figures such as Sen. Bernie Sanders (I–Vt.) and Nobel laureate and New York Times columnist Paul Krugman want us to follow Europe's lead when it comes to healthcare, government spending, tax policy, business regulations, and restrictions on free speech.

In Eurotrash: Why America Must Reject the Failed Ideas of a Dying Continent, Harsanyi, a syndicated columnist and senior writer at National Review, documents how the United States is doing far better across a wide array of economic, cultural, and political indicators than Europe. It's a powerful argument that is as nuanced as it is polemical. For instance, he notes that Scandinavian countries are hardly as socialist as their American champions and critics both claim. He also notes that many nationalist conservatives seem hellbent on importing a loathsome blood-and-soil populism from Hungary and other European countries.

I talk with Harsanyi about all that and how his career—which includes stints at The Denver Post, Glenn Beck's The Blaze, and The Federalist—reflect massive changes in the media landscape and what it means to be on the political right (he considers himself a conservative with some libertarian leanings). Born in 1970 and raised in Queens and Long Island by Hungarian refugees from communism, he remains deeply critical of many of former President Donald Trump's protectionist policies while also freaked out by President Joe Biden's massive government spending.

The post David Harsanyi: Why America Must Reject 'Eurotrash' Ideas appeared first on Reason.com.

"More and more people are seceding from the pandemic, basically saying, 'Well, we've got a better idea of what the risks are for us personally. We now can calibrate…more of the risks that we want to take. As that happens, more and more people will be able to leave the pandemic behind as we go forward into the next year," says Reason Science Correspondent Ronald Bailey, who has written provocatively that the pandemic will end when "we decide to stop paying attention to it." But will authorities at the local, state, and federal levels allow us to get back to our lives?

For the past two years, no topic has dominated our lives like COVID-19, the respiratory virus that has killed 820,000 Americans and triggered lockdowns at work and school, travel restrictions, vaccine and mask mandates, massive levels of new government spending during peacetime, and other big and small interventions into our everyday lives.

We've also responded to the pandemic with heroic measures such as the historically fast development and deployment of safe and effective vaccines and therapeutics and an increasingly healthy skepticism toward state power. In 2020, the first year of COVID, Gallup reported that fully 54 percent of Americans said the government should be doing more to solve our problems, only the second time in 30 years that a majority called for more state intervention. But after another year—and another unpopular president at the helm—the situation has reversed back to historical patterns, with 52 percent now agreeing that "the government is trying to do too many things that should be left to individuals and businesses."

So how and when will the pandemic—and all the policies, good and bad, that have followed—finally end? I sat down with Bailey and Reason Senior Editor Jacob Sullum to talk about the uselessness of more lockdowns and mandates in the wake of ubiquitous vaccines, how the politicization of public health has rightly driven down trust in medical experts, the ongoing failure of the FDA and other government agencies to rise to the occasion, and the troubling turn of many people, including libertarians, into full-blown anti-vaxxers in the wake of so much misinformation coming from official sources and activists alike.

Sullum, who writes about public health, sounds a cautious note about the legacy of COVID-19. He says that COVID-19 is the sort of emergency—an airborne respiratory virus—that, from a libertarian perspective, government has a legitimate role in combating. But he worries that we'll forget how various levels of government overreached and exceeded legitimate functions of the state with no increase in positive outcomes. "We'll have more emergencies in the future," he says. "We could have a life that's just filled with these sort of rolling emergencies that justify what are no longer extraordinary exercises of power, but just [become] standard operating procedure. I don't think that adults will respond that way because they remember what it was like beforehand and they understood the transition. Younger kids might, if that's mostly what they've known. So I have a hope and a fear."

The post Why the Pandemic Will End Only When <i>We</i> Demand It's Over appeared first on Reason.com.

"I am leaving New York City for Florida." wrote self-confessed "New York supremacist" and New York Post columnist Karol Markowicz in a widely circulated article for Fox News. She's not happy about it, but she's also not apologizing. What drove her out of the city she and her husband called home for decades was the arbitrary and capricious treatment of students, including her three young children, stuck in public K-12 schools during the pandemic. She's vamoosing "because they took away school during the pandemic and not enough of my fellow New Yorkers cared. I kept looking around at a civilization that does not value education. Or worse, values it for their own kids, in the form of private pods or putting them into open private schools, but won't fight for their less fortunate neighbors to have the same."

Markowicz is not alone. In 2020, some 320,000 people left New York City. Her family's destination is Florida, where the cost of living is cheaper and the schools—and just about everything else—have stayed open during much of the past two years.

Her story is representative of a large swath of refugees leaving big-population blue states for places like Texas and Florida. For the first in recorded history, California lost people year over year and a congressional seat. The Florida Department of Highway Safety and Motor Vehicles reported that "51,108 New Yorkers moved to Florida between April 2020 and April 2021." The Sunshine State surpassed New York in population in 2014 and over the course of the decade between 2010 and 2020, it gained 14.6 percent in residents while New York scratched out a gain of just 4.2 percent, well below U.S. growth of 7.4 percent. The gap between the two states continues to grow, with Florida boasting 21.8 million people and New York at 19.8 million people in the latest Census data.

"It's ridiculous to live anywhere else," Markowicz tells Nick Gillespie. "But it turns out that the city hates children and I can't be a part of that anymore."

The post Karol Markowicz's Escape From New York Should Worry Blue-State America appeared first on Reason.com.

Everywhere you looked this past spring, you saw stories about the preordained "hot vax summer" and "slutty summer" that was about to erupt in America like a long-simmering volcano of carnal desire.

Real and imagined experts predicted that single people, newly vaxxed and after a long, involuntary sexual pause due to COVID-19 lockdowns, would be on the prowl like some mix of the premenopausal Sex and the City girls, inmates freed after 18 months in solitary confinement, and the randy castaways of Love Island.

But like so many action films released in June, July, and August, the reality just didn't live up to the hype. While some observers say the reasons for "hot vax summer" going softer than Liberace at a speculum conference include the delta variant and the rise of online porn, Helen Fisher says it's simply because there's been a long, slow decline in one-night stands and hookup culture for years.

Fisher is an anthropologist who is the chief science adviser to Match.com, a senior research fellow at the Kinsey Institute, and the author of, most recently, a revised edition of Anatomy of Love (2016).

For each of the past 11 years, she's overseen Singles in America, an annual survey of more than 5,000 singles of every age, gender, and sexual orientation. Across the board, but especially among millennials and Generation Z, she says that "looks are out, emotional maturity is in. Stability is the new sexy." There are lots of reasons for this, but she cites younger people's interests in self-care as driving the changes along with the ever-rising options for women in education and work.

As women's status, earnings, and life opportunities have risen, says Fisher, they have become pickier about partners. Men, too, have changed, and are now more likely than women to say they want a long-term partner. They also want a partner who is well-educated, successful, and financially stable—the so-called George Clooney Effect. This new parity is reflected in one of the survey's most remarkable findings: An equal number of men and women say they faked orgasms in the past year.

Fisher talks with Nick Gillespie about the turn to what she calls "slow love" in an age of dating apps, the relief most men feel at not having to be the sole breadwinner, and why the rise of growing sexual opportunities is libertarian but not libertine.

The post Helen Fisher: Why the 'Hot Vax Slutty Summer' Never Happened appeared first on Reason.com.

Kenny Xu is the president of the nonprofit Color Us United, which advocates "for a race-blind America" and the author of An Inconvenient Minority: The Attack on Asian American Excellence and the Fight for Meritocracy. He's also a Robert Novak fellow at The Fund for American Studies.

Xu is the son of Chinese immigrants. Some of the most interesting parts of his book retell his experiences grappling with failing to live up to model-minority expectations. Just 24 years old, he writes passionately about the long history of legal discrimination against Chinese and Japanese people in America and what he says are increasingly harsh attacks on traditional definitions of merit and achievement that disproportionately hurt Asian Americans. He's a critic of Harvard's controversial admissions practices, which he says discriminate against Asians in an ill-fated attempt to pump up representation by blacks and Latinos.

In a fiery and intense conversation with Nick Gillespie, Xu also talks about the roles of religion and family in his life and the life of the Asian American community more broadly.

The post Kenny Xu: The Growing Attacks on Asian American Excellence appeared first on Reason.com.

With apologies to Elvis Presley: Can 75 million Kenny G fans be wrong to love the man who inspired the "smooth jazz" genre? That's the question at the heart of the brilliant new HBO documentary, Listening to Kenny G.

Best known for such instrumental hits as "Songbird" and "Silhouette," the saxophonist formerly known as Kenneth Gorelick has sold 75 million records since the 1980s and has recently enjoyed new fame by collaborating with such artists as Kanye West and the Weeknd. Yet one constant throughout his career has been the incredible amount of bile that jazz artists and critics have spewed his way.

Listening To Kenny G is, director Penny Lane tells Nick Gillespie, "an exploration of why Kenny G is the most popular and successful and best-selling instrumentalist of all time and why that success makes a certain subset of people like really mad." It's by turns funny and deep as jazz critics rail against the title character, who seems to take everything in stride.

Lane also talks about her previous documentaries, including Our Nixon (2013) and Hail Satan? (2019; watch a Reason interview about it here), why Errol Morris is her guiding light as a nonfiction filmmaker, and what she likes about Reason, which she started reading in college. "Society," she explains, "needs people who are annoying, who stand outside and say, yeah, but what about this? You know? I've always identified with that kind of personality."

The post Penny Lane: Can 75 Million Kenny G Fans Be Wrong? appeared first on Reason.com.

Have you ever stopped to think about why all the food at the traditional Thanksgiving dinner gets put out at the same time? No courses and no servers—just a culinary dump of turkey and all the fixings onto the table and an ensuing feeding frenzy. 

As food historian Rachel Laudan explains, both what gets eaten at Thanksgiving and how it gets served is no accident. When Thanksgiving became a national holiday back in 1863, the Cuisine and Empire author says, its creator explicitly conceived of the day as a repudiation of European customs, particularly those steeped in class-based French origins. Sarah Josepha Hale designed the standard Thanksgiving meal as an affirmation of our (small "r") republican virtues. Turkey was cheap to procure, pumpkin pie was easy to make, and cranberry sauce was a simple take on the fancy toppings typical in a French court. 

The meaning of Thanksgiving has changed over the years—thanks in part to Julia Child's successful effort to democratize French cuisine—but even today, "nobody suggests adding truffles to your turkey," says Laudan, who wrote about the politics of Thanksgiving for the Boston Globe.

Back in 2016, Nick Gillespie interviewed Laudan about the meaning of Thanksgiving, why she is not a fan of "organic" food, and other aspects of culinary history. It's a great conversation that is every bit as filling as Thanksgiving—and a lot less coma-inducing—and Reason is happy to share it again on the eve of Thanksgiving in 2021.

The post Rachel Laudan: Why Thanksgiving Dinner Is Served All at Once appeared first on Reason.com.

In his bestselling new book, Woke Racism: How a New Religion Has Betrayed Black America, New York Times columnist and Columbia University linguist John McWhorter argues that the ideas of Robin DiAngelo, Ibram X. Kendi, and The 1619 Project undermine blacks by sharpening racial divides and distracting from actual obstacles to real progress.

Nick Gillespie spoke with the 56-year-old McWhorter about what white people get out of cooperating with an ideological agenda that casts them as devils, what black people gain by "performing" victimhood, and what needs to change so that all Americans can get on with creating a more perfect union.

The post John McWhorter: How To Defeat 'Woke Racism' appeared first on Reason.com.

All respiratory pandemics follow a script, one that's as much social and political as it is medical or epidemiological, says Yale sociologist and medical doctor Nicholas Christakis, who has just released a new paperback edition of his authoritative book, Apollo's Arrow: The Profound and Enduring Impact of Coronavirus on the Way We Live.

In his conversation with Nick Gillespie, Christakis pulls no punches when slamming the failures of our politicians and public health officials to act quickly and speak honestly about the COVID-19 pandemic which has left 750,000 Americans dead. 

As a newly minted member of the advisory council for the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) and a high-profile target of ultra-woke campus activists, Christakis talks about how COVID misinformation has also been spread by pundits and politicians who seem more interested in pushing ideology than science and why the best way forward—really, the only way forward—is through robust debate in the public square. He also argues that recent events on campuses—such as Massachusetts Institute of Technology canceling a talk by a scientist due to his critical views on affirmative action—underscore the need for a radical shift in favor of free speech at our colleges and universities.

Christakis previously appeared on The Reason Interview in April 2019, to discuss his book Blueprint: The Evolutionary Origins of a Good Society and his viral showdown with students over Halloween costumes. Listen to it or watch it here.

The post Nicholas Christakis: How To End the Covid Pandemic appeared first on Reason.com.

Reason's December special issue marks the 30th anniversary of the collapse of the Soviet Union. This story is part of our exploration of the global legacy of that evil empire, and our effort to be certain that the dire consequences of communism are not forgotten.

If the Soviet Union was notoriously incapable of producing blue jeans, smokeable cigarettes, and durable cars in the numbers its citizens craved, it was unrivaled at producing world-class chess grandmasters. From the end of World War II until the Evil Empire dissolved in 1991, all but one world champion—the American Bobby Fischer, who claimed the title in 1972 from one Soviet and surrendered it to another in 1975 when he refused to defend his crown—represented the USSR.

None was better than Garry Kasparov, who became world champion in 1985 at the tender, record-setting age of 22 and held the title until 2000. Widely considered the greatest chess player in modern history, he held the global top ranking for a total of 255 months between 1984 and his retirement in 2005.

Yet Kasparov was never a pliant supporter of the system that produced him—far from it. Born in 1963 to parents who were Jewish and Armenian, two minorities regarded as suspect, and raised in the relatively provincial city of Baku, Azerbaijan, he grew up feeling alienated from the Soviet Union's cultural and political centers in St. Petersburg and Moscow. Because of his chess prowess—which he emphasizes was greatly nurtured by the same government that immiserated and imprisoned so many of his countrymen—he was able to travel abroad for competitions, and he describes youthful trips to France and Germany as nothing short of revelatory. The casual "abundance" of what used to be called "the free world" "just felt different," he says. "I could immediately see the quality of life….It was different and it was more natural." Beyond the Iron Curtain, he encountered the anti-communist works of George Orwell and was able to read exiled dissident Alexander Solzhenitsyn's suppressed indictments of totalitarianism.

Kasparov joined the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in 1984 but was critical of the regime during that decade. In 1990, he joined the Democratic Party of Russia and became increasingly outspoken in favor of human rights, representative democracy, and limited government. In post-Soviet Russia, he used his celebrity and influence to spearhead attempts to build civil society and conduct fair elections, emerging as a leading critic of Russian leader Vladimir Putin. He aborted a run for president in 2007 only after authorities made it impossible for his followers to meet. By the early 2010s, he had been arrested for participating in unauthorized anti-government demonstrations and was widely believed to be the author of a popular petition demanding Putin's resignation. Today he resides in New York City and Croatia with his wife and two of his children; they cannot return to Russia for fear of persecution.

Kasparov continues to lobby for freedom, in the former Soviet Union and beyond. Since 2011, he has served as the chairman of the Human Rights Foundation, an organization that focuses on reform in closed societies such as North Korea, Venezuela, Iran, Saudi Arabia, and several former Soviet republics.

In September, Reason's Nick Gillespie spoke with the chess grandmaster in New York about what it was like to be the beneficiary of a catastrophically failed Soviet system and what lessons the world—especially American democratic socialists—should remember three decades after its collapse.

The post Garry Kasparov: Greatest Soviet Chess Champion on the Awful System That Created Him appeared first on Reason.com.

As anyone who is involved in drug policy can tell you, Afghanistan wasn't really America's longest war. That shady honor belongs to the war on drugs, which has been waged at the state, local, and federal levels for well over a century, even before President Richard Nixon officially declared in 1971 that he was starting "an all-out offensive" on the "drug abuse" he called "America's public enemy number one."

Yet it's obvious that the drug war is in fact winding down. In the 1990s, medical marijuana was legalized in various states. Now 16 states have legalized recreational marijuana, with more to come. Last fall, nine out of nine drug legalization or decriminalization measures passed at the ballot box, the use of MDMA to treat PTSD is in final clinical trials with the Food and Drug Administration, and there is an increasingly visible cultural shift that is welcoming to psychedelics and other mind-expanding substances. This November, LSD even comes to that safest of all cultural playgrounds, Broadway, with the musical Flying Over Sunset, a fictional account of a meeting between novelist Aldous Huxley, playwright/ambassador Clare Boothe Luce, and movie star Cary Grant, all of whom experimented with psychedelics in the late 1950s and early '60s.

Nick Gillespie's guest is the one person in the best position to explain and interpret the country's shifting attitudes toward drug prohibition and drug use. He's Ethan Nadelmann, the 64-year-old founder and former head of the Drug Policy Alliance, one of the oldest and most effective outfits fighting for pharmacological freedom. A former college professor who taught political science, Nadelmann brings together an academic's rigor and depth of knowledge with an activist's sense of urgency and energy (read a 1994 Reason interview with him conducted by Jacob Sullum).

Over the years, Nadelmann has allied and sparred with everyone across the political spectrum to make drug policy more humane and less punitive while also talking up the positives of responsible drug use. You can listen to him on his new weekly podcast Psychoactive, where recent guests have included psychedelic enthusiast and best-selling author Tim Ferriss, leading psychotherapist and psychopharmacologist Julie Holland, integrative medicine guru Andrew Weil, and advice columnist Dan Savage on "sex, drugs, and freedom."

This is a great and rollicking conversation about the past 50 years of drug laws and drug culture—and what comes next as America oh-so-slowly starts pulling out of its longest war.

Photo: Gage Skidmore.

The post Ethan Nadelmann: How To End the Drug War (and What Comes Next) appeared first on Reason.com.

Andrew Yang's run for the Democratic Party's presidential nomination didn't last all that long, but his support for a universal basic income (UBI) pushed that arcane topic to the center of ongoing policy debates about how best to help Americans dislocated by technological and economic change.

The 46-year-old entrepreneur, who also ran unsuccessfully this year to become New York City's mayor, has a new book out. Forward: Notes on the Future of Our Democracy, is part campaign memoir and part political manifesto in which he outlines the principles and policies he thinks are essential to making America once again a land of opportunity. To further his agenda, he has also launched the Forward Party, which proclaims it is neither left nor right in its mission statement.

"We can tell that the duopoly is killing us," says Yang. "It's turning us against each other. Political stress is at civil war levels. Political violence is becoming more and more of an inevitability." The Forward Party's core principles include pushing for open primaries and ranked-choice voting, creating a basic income for all citizens, promoting "human-centered capitalism," and infusing politics with "grace and tolerance."

He talked about all that—and how his agenda intersects with libertarian ideas—with Reason's Nick Gillespie.

Photo: Ron Adar / SOPA Images/Sipa USA/Newscom

The post Andrew Yang: 'Political Violence Is Becoming More and More of an Inevitability' appeared first on Reason.com.

In the controversial yet bestselling books The Better Angels of Our Nature and Enlightenment Now, Harvard linguist Steven Pinker made the case that humanity has been getting richer and less violent over the past two centuries.

In his new book, Rationality: What It Is, Why It Seems Scarce, Why It Matters, he argues that our ability to reason and think critically is central to human flourishing and undergirds our phenomenal material and moral progress since the Enlightenment. Pinker lays out the basic cognitive biases that cloud our thinking and give rise to intensely polarized and tribalistic worldviews that threaten continued advances. And he tells Reason's Nick Gillespie how all of us can become better, sharper thinkers in all aspects of our lives.

Photo: Andrew West CC BY SA 4.0

The post Steven Pinker: Rationality Has Made Us Richer, Kinder, and More Free appeared first on Reason.com.

Because of the war on terror, argues Rafia Zakaria, American feminism has been recast from a "movement that existed in opposition to the state, as a critique of its institutions and mores…[to] one that serve[s] the state's interests through any means imaginable." Nothing exemplifies this tragic turn better, she says, than the Oscar-winning movie Zero Dark Thirty, in which the female lead (played by Jessica Chastain) is exalted as a torturer who can more than keep up with her male colleagues when it comes to breaking the bodies of real and suspected terrorists.

In Against White Feminism, Zakaria makes the case that Western feminism has been mostly interested in achieving equality between white women and white men, often at the expense of black and brown people. After the 9/11 attacks, for instance, this led many feminist organizations to support the invasion and occupation of Afghanistan and to push for top-down aid programs that didn't take into account what Afghan women actually wanted or needed.

It's a provocative book that critiques feminists from Simone de Beauvoir to Betty Friedan to Eve Ensler and forces a reevaluation of how best to empower all women around the globe, who are often struggling against sexism that is deeply entwined with state power.

Born in Pakistan and now living in the United States, Zakaria is the author of The Upstairs Wife and writes at Rafia (Unedited) on Substack. In 2017, Nick Gillespie interviewed her about her book Veil for Reason. Listen to that here.

The post How Afghanistan Became the First 'Feminist' War appeared first on Reason.com.

What are the long-term psychological effects of growing up in a world where the 9/11 attacks and school shootings drastically restructured your childhood around overblown fears of random violence, where the Great Recession wiped out your parents' savings and the historically slow economic recovery hampered your job prospects for a decade, and where you were reminded every single day that the world only has a few years left before climate change makes the planet uninhabitable? And on top of all that, add increasingly intense political polarization, racial reckonings, and Covid-19?

Meet "Generation Disaster," the subject of a fascinating new book by State University of New York psychologist Karla Vermeulen. Subtitled Coming of Age Post 9/11, Generation Disaster is built around a massive national survey of people born between 1990 and 2001. Vermeulen looks at the cumulative impact of being raised in a relentlessly apocalyptic social and political environment, the role that Boomer and Gen X parents and authorities play in stoking anxiety, and how new forms of technology and media have influenced the worldviews of Millennials and Gen Z members roughly between the ages of 20 and 30.

In an era of mounting generational hostility, Karla Vermeulen is an essential mediator between older and younger Americans and her book, Generation Disaster, is a rich, empathetic portrait of a group too often simply—and wrongly—dismissed as weak, lazy, and entitled.

The post Karla Vermeulen: Inside the Mind of 'Generation Disaster' appeared first on Reason.com.

Everywhere you turn these days, big tech companies are under fire. Instagram's supposedly addictive and negative effects on teenage girls have lawmakers comparing its parent company Facebook to Big Tobacco.

Conservatives like Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-Fla.) and Gov. Gregg Abbott (R-Texas) have signed controversial legislation banning social media platforms from suspending or moderating the accounts of political candidates. Supreme Court Associate Justice Clarence Thomas has suggested private businesses like Twitter and YouTube should be classified as common carriers, subject to strict regulation by the federal government.

Liberal legislators in Colorado have proposed creating a "digital communications commission" that would have the power to change how platforms do business in the name of fighting "hate speech" and "misinformation." Lawmakers in at least 38 states have introduced over 100 laws in the past couple of years to regulate online speech and related issues.

In his new book Tech Panic, Reason Senior Editor Robby Soave says such attacks are nothing more than modern-day witch hunts whose main accusations fall apart under even mild scrutiny. They are contemporary versions of past freakouts over video games, rock music, and comic books. "We shouldn't fear Facebook or the future," writes Soave. The actual threat, he says, comes not from private companies but from politicians, woke mobs, social conservatives, and activists whose real goal is to limit speech they don't like.

The post Robby Soave: Today's Bipartisan Tech Panic Is Yesteryear's Freakout Over Video Games appeared first on Reason.com.

"Arguing about the nature of the country is as American as frozen apple pie with a slice of processed cheese," says the aspirationally acute 80-year-old Pulitzer Prize winner George Will, now in his sixth decade as a leading voice in debates over culture, politics, and ideas. "If you don't like arguing, you picked the wrong country." 

In 1973, Will was a young academic coming off a stint as a Senate staffer when he began writing columns for National Review and The Washington Post. Since then he has churned out "6,000 or so" pieces (his count) on a weekly schedule, calling to mind the longevity and endurance of Cal Ripken, Jr., who played more consecutive baseball games than anyone in history and whose work ethic was lionized by Will in his 1990 bestseller, Men at Work: The Craft of Baseball.

Will's newest book is American Happiness and Discontents, a collection of columns from 2008 to 2020 that covers the Great Recession and the Obama years to what he calls the crybaby presidency of Donald J. Trump and the rise of identity politics as a major force in contemporary America. Of special interest are his columns drawing complicated lessons from the World War II era, when the country triumphed over authoritarianism and genocide abroad even as it practiced racial apartheid at home. Will's analysis of and love for America is unabashedly patriotic but it is never jingoistic or untroubled by tough historical truths.

Though he started out firmly on the conservative right, Will has become more and more libertarian, especially in his insistence that mere politics should never be the all-consuming passion of human endeavor and that America remains a place dedicated to a future that is better than the present. "If we can rein in our appetite for government to dispense benefits," he says, and replace it with a government "that defends the shores, fills the potholes, and otherwise gets out of the way, we're going to see again, the creativity of the American people."

The post George Will: Why He's Against Biden, Trump, and the 1619 Project—And Bullish on the Future appeared first on Reason.com.

In the wake of the 9/11 attacks, the United States invaded and occupied two countries, bombed four others, helped to create 21 million refugees and cause over 800,000 deaths, and spent over $6 trillion on combat and anti-terrorism measures.

In Reign of Terror, national security reporter Spencer Ackerman argues that the war on terror also profoundly destabilized American politics and helped to produce the Donald Trump presidency. He talks with Reason about how to stop the growth in government surveillance and military interventionism underwritten by overwrought fears of Islamic terrorism.

The post Spencer Ackerman: How 9/11 Destabilized America and Produced Trump appeared first on Reason.com.

"You don't get to lose a war and expect the result to look like you won it," says historian Stephen Wertheim of the violent and chaotic withdrawal of United States forces and personnel from Afghanistan. "Yet some in Washington are denying reality, calling for still more war and blaming Biden for their failure."

Wertheim is the author of Tomorrow, the World: The Birth of U.S. Global Supremacy, a study of how American strategists during World War II conflated military supremacy with internationalism, and a senior fellow in the American Statecraft Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

He talks with Nick Gillespie about how the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq were doomed to failure from their earliest days, what policy makers should be focused on as we approach the 20th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, and why a fundamental rethink of U.S. military and foreign policy is not only urgent but, after a radical shift in public opinion, eminently possible.

The post Stephen Wertheim: 9/11, Afghanistan, and Failed Foreign Policy appeared first on Reason.com.

When the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) released its highly anticipated report on global warming in early August, U.N Secretary-General António Guterres declared it "a code red for humanity," insisting that "the alarm bells are deafening, and the evidence is irrefutable: greenhouse-gas emissions from fossil-fuel burning and deforestation are choking our planet and putting billions of people at immediate risk."

Guterres' "code red" language was echoed by many reporters and activists, some of whom called humanity "guilty as hell" of "climate crimes." Others prophesied that the climate news was only going to get worse and that we faced a choice of immediately passing the Green New Deal or death.

Roger Pielke Jr., a professor of environmental studies at the University of Colorado, thinks such reactions are not only wrong but "irresponsible." Pielke believes that temperatures are rising in response to human activity, but he also argues that the alarmism dominating the climate discussion is counterproductive. "Nowhere does the IPCC report say that billions of people are at immediate risk," he says, stressing the gap between what's actually in the report and the highly politicized way we discuss climate change.

The post Roger Pielke Jr.: We Are Successfully Adapting To Climate Change appeared first on Reason.com.

Was President Joe Biden's withdrawal of United States troops and personnel from Afghanistan a poorly planned mistake or a long-overdue decision?

Scott Horton says it's the latter. He's the head of the Libertarian Institute, the editorial director of Antiwar.com, and the host of the Scott Horton Show podcast. Based in Austin, Texas, Horton is also the author of the new book Enough Already: Time To End the War on Terrorism.

Nick Gillespie talks with him about Biden's defense of the withdrawal from Afghanistan, why U.S. foreign policy has been a bipartisan disaster for all of the 21st century, and how a libertarian approach to both domestic and foreign affairs would make people better off all over the globe.

The post Scott Horton: U.S. Should Have Pulled Out Of Afghanistan Years Ago appeared first on Reason.com.

The United States may be a secular nation but Congress has begun every session since before there was a Bill of Rights with a prayer. In When Rabbis Bless Congress, Howard Mortman explores that weird tradition while paying special attention to Jewish religious leaders whose first appearance came in early 1860, when the pro-slavery, Swedish-born Morris Jacob Raphall addressed Congress weeks before Abraham Lincoln was sworn in as president. Raphall's exotic garb and anodyne invocations of divine blessings were received warmly by both Southern members and The New York Times.

"This is a book for lovers of congressional history, for junkies of congressional history," says Mortman, who tells Nick Gillespie that the content of the prayers adds up to an interesting, off-kilter history of the nation. From slavery and the Civil War to the Depression and World War II to Vietnam and women's rights, the addresses made by religious leaders are "mirroring what we as a country are experiencing."

For the past decade-plus, Mortman has been communications director for C-SPAN, the cable network that provides live coverage of Congress and a variety of related programming. He got his start working for the former congressman, Housing and Urban Development secretary, and vice-presidential candidate Jack Kemp, and was a producer at MSNBC's Hardball before the network's decision to go hard left. He also worked as a columnist and on-air host of an early web show for National Journal's Hotline.

In a discussion about the rise of the internet and decentralized news sources, he tells Reason that the past 25 years have seen constant change in legacy media and that The New York Times, NPR, and most cable news are rightly understood to be more biased than in the past. If outlets were more upfront about that and if they strove to be fair to views they disagreed with, he says, the loss of trust and confidence in media would be less worrisome. "If you're sleeping with elephants, you can't cover the circus," says Mortman, paraphrasing the old Times editor Abe Rosenthal. The rise of new voices and new perspectives is great, he says, but if you're going to build a strong reputation, you've got to be believed and respected especially by your opponents. Absent that, the result is cacophony and polarization rather than a vibrant public square of debate.

The post Howard Mortman: Why Does Congress Pray Every Day? appeared first on Reason.com.

In a world where workplace diversity sessions increasingly resemble Maoist struggle sessions, Chloé Valdary's Theory of Enchantment seminars seek to bring people together using popular culture to explore our common humanity and generate empathy rather than division. 

The 28-year-old Valdary started a group to combat anti-semitism as an undergraduate at the University of New Oreans, and after a fellowship at the Wall Street Journal opinion page, she created Theory of Enchantment as an alternative to the antiracist programs of Ibram X. Kendi and Robin DiAngelo, which she believes deepen the very resentments they seek to alleviate. Her program employs materials as varied as Disney's Lion King, music from Kendrick Lamar, and writings by James Baldwin and Cheryl Strayed. 

Valdary spoke to Reason about how her life experiences inform Theory of Enchantment, why the demand for her program is growing, and why she's optimistic about the future of race relations and individualism.

The post Chloe Valdary: How Kendrick Lamar and <i>The Lion King</i> Can Help Close the Racial Divide appeared first on Reason.com.

The comedian and podcaster Dave Smith, a rising presence in Libertarian Party (L.P.) circles, says he's considering running for the party's presidential nomination in 2024.

Smith says a major reason he expects to run is that even though the 2020 nominee, Jo Jorgensen, got the second-highest vote total in L.P. history, he thinks she didn't push back hard enough on government lockdowns and overreach in its fight against COVID, which he sees as a missed opportunity to build a bigger libertarian movement.

A vocal opponent of wokeness and political correctness, Smith is quick to attack fellow libertarians whom he thinks are naive about how the state maintains its power. He's said that he'd "take a red-pilled leftie over a blue-pilled libertarian any day."

After the Biden administration revealed it was pushing Facebook to restrict accounts it says are spreading misinformation about COVID-19, Smith tweeted, "This administration has exposed the useful idiots who call themselves libertarians. Saying 'it's a private company' for the last few years, ignoring what is obviously the biggest threat to liberty. They unwittingly support the largest government in human history."

After that take was discussed on a recent Reason Roundtable podcast, Smith tweeted that my fellow panelists and I had misrepresented his views. So I reached out to him so he could clarify his views on the intersection of big government and Big Tech, and discuss the future of the L.P., why he has no plans to vaccinate himself or his young daughter, and why he believes libertarians should be more engaged in the culture war.

The post Dave Smith: Libertarians vs. Big Tech, Big Government, and…Other Libertarians appeared first on Reason.com.

Today's advertiser is inkl, a unique "best of news" service that unlocks $12,000 worth of news for just $75 a year (go here for that special rate for Reason fans).

"Freedom was the slogan of the times. The word was invoked to justify everything," writes Louis Menand at the start of his wide-ranging and endlessly fascinating history of post-World War II culture, The Free World: Art and Thought in the Cold War. After years of economic deprivation, mass slaughter in two world wars, and the continuing negative, repressive example of the Soviet Union, most of the "free world" was ready to bust out into something new and different.

The Pulitzer-winning author, Harvard professor, and New Yorker contributor discusses how major figures and movements such as Lionel Trilling and other literary and cultural critics, Allen Ginsberg and the Beats, Andy Warhol and the pop art movement, James Baldwin and black protest artists, Betty Friedan and feminists, the Beatles and pop musicians pushed all sorts of boundaries in relentless attempts to express themselves and radically transform cultural, economic, and political life. He talks with Nick Gillespie about how those quests took on distinct but related forms depending on the backgrounds of the people involved, and how understanding them is essential to understanding contemporary America.

The post Louis Menand: 'Freedom Was the Slogan of the Times' appeared first on Reason.com.

On July 11, thousands of Cubans in dozens of cities around the island nation took to the streets to protest the country's communist dictatorship and chronic shortages in food, energy, and medicine, all of which have been made worse by the pandemic. These are the biggest anti-government demonstrations in Cuba in decades, the size and scope of which suggest parallels to the Arab Spring from a decade ago.

The demonstrations have been enabled by social media and the internet, which only came to Cuba in a big way in late 2018 when President Miguel Diaz-Canel allowed citizens access to data plans on their cellphones.

To better understand exactly how Facebook, YouTube, WhatsApp, and other social media platforms are connecting the Cuban people and undermining state control, Nick Gillespie speaks with Ted Henken, who teaches sociology and Latin American studies at City University of New York's Baruch College and is the co-editor of Cuba's Digital Revolution. He talks about the near-term, mid-term, and long-term implications of the recent protests, how the United States might respond, and the internet's potential (and limits) when it comes to challenging an authoritarian government that has held power for over 60 years.

The post Ted Henken: How Social Media Fuels the Protests in Cuba appeared first on Reason.com.

Abigail Shrier's Irreversible Damage: The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters was one of last year's most celebrated—and condemned—books. It showed up in year-end lists of top books but was also banned by Target and her publisher was disallowed from buying ads at Amazon.*

"Abigail Shrier's book is a dangerous polemic with a goal of making people not trans," wrote an American Civil Liberties Union attorney on Twitter. "We have to fight these ideas which are leading to the criminalization of trans life again."

A lawyer by training, Shrier says she fully supports the rights of adults to undergo gender-reassignment surgery. But she's concerned that teenage girls are making irrevocable changes to their bodies that in coming years they might wish they could reverse.

In a new paperback edition of Irreversible Damage, Shrier follows up on several of the women she spoke with and details her experiences of being deplatformed.*

Reason's Nick Gillespie spoke with Shrier about the controversy over her book, the Streisand effect, and the future of free expression in an increasingly polarized cultural landscape.

*CORRECTION: A previous version of this article mistakenly stated that Irreversible Damage had been banned at Amazon. The platform never stopped offering the book for sale but its publisher, Regnery, was not allowed to buy ads and other promotions for it on the site.

The post Abigail Shrier: Trans Activists, Cancel Culture, and the Future of Free Expression appeared first on Reason.com.

Few figures in the bitcoin community are as controversial and visionary as Erik Voorhees, founder and CEO of the cryptocurrency exchange ShapeShift.

Back when cryptocurrency was in its infancy and its conferences included lectures delivered to empty rooms, Voorhees was helping to popularize bitcoin's unique attributes with an unregulated online casino called SatoshiDice.

After he sold SatoshiDice, Voorhees was investigated by the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and was fined $50,000, observing that the investigators didn't seem to understand bitcoin. "As much as I hated government before," he recalled, "then I was like, 'man, this is what these people do, go around ruining innocent people's lives.'"

The son of libertarian businessman and writer Jacques Voorhees, he discovered bitcoin in 2011 while living in New Hampshire as a member of the Free State Project. Voorhees was employee number three at BitInstant, an early exchange backed by Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss and whose founder, Charlie Shrem, ultimately went to prison on charges of operating an unlicensed money-transmitting business.

Unlike bitcoin maximalists, who insist that bitcoin is the only cryptocurrency with any viable future, Voorhees maintains that other coins do serve a purpose.

In 2017, as fees on the network were climbing, he controversially backed an unsuccessful attempt to scale up bitcoin's ability to process transactions, which critics said would have weakened the network's security and decentralized structure.

At the Bitcoin 2021 conference in Miami, Voorhees talked to Reason's Nick Gillespie about the immense growth not just in the market caps of cryptocurrencies but in their economic and cultural legitimacy, the ways they challenge central banks and political power, and why he believes in multiple coins and continuing innovation in digital currency.

The post Erik Voorhees: Bitcoin's Point Is 'To Change the Whole Financial System of the Planet.' appeared first on Reason.com.

Can the Libertarian Party (L.P.) become "a major contender that consistently wins elections?"

If the organization's dismal, 50-year track record in winning elections isn't discouraging enough, now the L.P. is in disarray after its chairman and two members of its national committee resigned in the wake of an attempt to decertify the New Hampshire affiliate due to conflicts over its social media presence. 

This episode has revealed an organization at war with itself over vision, tactics, and messaging.

To get a better sense of what's going on, Nick Gillespie spoke with former Rep. Justin Amash (L–Mich.), who finished his five terms in office as the first and only Libertarian to hold national office. He had been elected as a Republican, became an Independent, and affiliated with the L.P. for the last few months of his tenure. Amash flirted with a run for the L.P.'s presidential nomination in 2020 before choosing to drop out of consideration. Despite not holding an official position in the party's leadership, he is its best-known member.

In the wake of the recent scandal, he chastised the New Hampshire affiliate for its "horrible messaging" even as he said attempts to remove its leadership were illegitimate. "I'm committed to making [the L.P.] a major contender that consistently wins elections," he wrote. "We must work together to build a big-tent party that can take on the old parties and defend the rights of the people."

The post Justin Amash: The Libertarian Party Needs To Stop 'Edge-Lording' and Get Serious About Elections appeared first on Reason.com.

During the 2008 presidential election, Vijay Boyapati quit his job as an engineer at Google to campaign for Ron Paul in New Hampshire. A few years after that, he discovered bitcoin, and in 2018 he published an essay on Medium titled "The Bullish Case for Bitcoin," which got widespread attention and was translated into more than 20 languages.

Boyapati, an Australian native who now lives in the Pacific Northwest, launched a fundraiser on Kickstarter to expand the essay into a book, and it was released at the star-studded 2021 Bitcoin Conference, which was held in early June in Miami.

Nick Gillespie caught up with Boyapati in Florida to talk about inflation, how bitcoin fits with the Austrian school of economics, his libertarian origin story, and what he thinks has to happen for bitcoin to finally become the new global monetary standard.

The post Vijay Boyapati: The Bullish Case for Bitcoin appeared first on Reason.com.

The Bitcoin 2021 Conference in Miami in early June wasn't just a celebration of the end of the pandemic and an opportunity for cryptocurrency and blockchain true believers to gather up close and maskless with more than 10,000 fellow travelers. It was a watershed moment for a technological and cultural movement whose goal is nothing short of the separation of money and state.

Bitcoin emerged just a dozen years ago, when a pseudonymous genius shared a nine-page paper on an obscure email list, and now it's the third-largest currency on the planet, according to Deutsche Bank. In another 12 years, we may look back on Bitcoin 2021 as the Woodstock of the crypto generation.

One of the biggest—and most surprising—breakout stars of the conference was Cynthia Lummis, a 66-year-old freshman Republican senator from Wyoming. From the stage and in an interview with Reason, Lummis forcefully made the case that bitcoin not only provides a legitimate alternative store of value and medium of exchange but would act as a check on the devaluation of the U.S. dollar and other currencies through the runaway creation of fiat money. She also believes that the growth of bitcoin—mistakenly assailed for its heavy use of electricity—is acting as a spur to create renewable energy in places such as Wyoming, and she extolled its privacy features in a world of increasing surveillance by governments and corporations alike.

The post Sen. Cynthia Lummis: Why I'm All In on Bitcoin appeared first on Reason.com.

"It took us four years just to identify the virus that caused AIDS in the '80s," says Steven Johnson. "Imagine COVID where it's four years before we even know what is causing the outbreak. That's what would have happened if we just shifted 20 years, 30 years earlier in terms of when this outbreak happened."

Johnson is the author of the new book Extra Life: A Short History of Living Longer, which is also running as a series on PBS (watch online here). The rapid advance in vaccine technology, which is bringing an end to the COVID-19 pandemic, is best understood in the context of a series of innovations that more than doubled the life expectancy of the human race over the last 100 years. Extra Life explores how innovations in epidemiological statistics, artificial fertilizer, toilets, and sanitation systems, along with vaccines and other measures, have allowed billions of people to flourish until old age. By 2016, global life expectancy at birth had reached 72 years, according to the World Health Organization. 

Johnson was a founder of the pioneering website Feed in the 1990s and has authored a shelf full of books about human progress, including such bestsellers as The Ghost Map, which recounted how doctors and researchers ended the threat of cholera in 19th-century London, and Future Perfect, which argued that the modern networked world is far more resilient than previous iterations.

He talks with Nick Gillespie about how we managed to massively increase our lifespans in the 20th century, and whether we can do even better in the 21st. They also talk about performance of the World Health Organization, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and the Food and Drug Administration when it comes to COVID-19 and how those agencies might rebuild trust and confidence in the post-pandemic world.

The post Steven Johnson: How We Doubled Life Expectancy in the 20th Century appeared first on Reason.com.

Andrew Doyle is an Irish journalist and writer best known as the creator of the Twitter personality Titania McGrath, a parody of an ultra-woke, 24-year-old, militant vegan who thinks she is a better poet than William Shakespeare. Though the 43-year-old Doyle describes himself as a left-winger, he is a fierce critic of cancel culture and a proponent of Brexit. He holds a doctorate from Oxford in early Renaissance poetry, is the host of the new nightly show GB News, and is a columnist for Spiked Online. (He's a previous guest on The Reason Interview with Nick Gillespie.)

Doyle is also the author of the new book Free Speech and Why It Matters, a comprehensive, learned, and compelling argument in favor of unfettered debate and open expression. Nick Gillespie talks with him about why cancel culture is on the rise, how to combat it, and what Titania McGrath is up to as she approaches her quarter-life crisis.

The post Andrew Doyle: Free Speech and Why It Matters appeared first on Reason.com.

Born in 1981, Freddie deBoer is an English Ph.D., the author of The Cult of Smart: How Our Broken Education System Perpetuates Social Injustice, and the proprietor of one of the liveliest, most provocative, and most controversial publications at Substack.

He is also a third-generation Marxist who believes that individuals are innately different from one another (probably due to inherited differences in intelligence and physical capacity) and that many of his fellow Bernie Sanders-loving, progressive inhabitants of Brooklyn are hurting the poor when they insist that all K-12 students take college prep classes and have access to higher education. "Education is not a weapon against inequality; it is an engine of inequality," he writes, sounding like Dirty Jobs' Mike Rowe when it comes to promoting well-paying but low-status trade jobs. What deBoer calls "the cult of smart"—the valorization of test-taking and a belief that all of us are blank slates who can be remediated through the right sort of instruction and environment—not only marginalizes the poor and "untalented," it ultimately blames them for their own condition.

His take on legacy media is equally acid, as when he tells critics of Substack, the controversial newsletter platform that has given a financially rewarding home to him and other writers who either left or never gained purchase at traditional journalistic outlets, "You don't like the writing that gets sold on Substack, cool, write better shit and sell it to more people."

Nick Gillespie talks with deBoer about his critiques of education, the mainstream media, and the contemporary left. They also wrangle over deBoer's call for "revolution, not evolution" and an end to capitalism, what it means to "want to live outside of exchange," and the surprising overlap between Marxists and libertarians when it comes to a range of current policy issues.

The post Freddie deBoer: Let's Kill the 'Cult of Smart' and Legacy Media appeared first on Reason.com.

Despite Americans' reputation for cockeyed optimism, we have always been suckers for declension narratives—the idea that the Golden Age ended sometime in the past and we have the bad luck to live in a world that is uniquely awful, unfair, and corrupt. Donald Trump built a successful presidential campaign on making America great again and his successor Joe Biden routinely harkens back to a time when things were better and more on the level.

Three of today's most widespread declension narratives involve fertility rates, income inequality, and economic mobility. We have fewer children than ever, goes the popular story, because nobody—even the wealthy!—can afford them anymore. The spread between rich and poor has never been bigger and it's only increasing. Kids today will be the first generation in America to have a lower standard of living than their parents.

These stories resonate with us emotionally and have obvious political utility, but are they true? My guest today is Scott Winship, the director of poverty studies at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI). He says that these declension narratives are misleading at best and outright wrong at worst. The reason families are getting smaller is because women have more control over their bodies and generally want fewer kids. When you factor in after-tax income and transfer programs, poor people are in fact doing better than ever. And his research shows that about 70 percent of us will make more inflation-adjusted income than our parents—a figure that hasn't changed in the past 50 years.

Winship has a doctorate in social policy from Harvard and, prior to joining the right-of-center AEI, he did stints at the Brookings Institution and Pew Research Center. Nick Gillespie talks with Winship about why we want to believe the world we live in is getting worse, how his thinking about social progress and ideology has changed over his career, and how he thinks we might make it easier for poor people to participate more fully in society. Winship also gives a defense of the much-maligned discipline of sociology as a vital way of understanding the world around us.

The post Scott Winship: Don't Believe Horror Stories About Fertility Rates, Income Inequality, and Economic Mobility appeared first on Reason.com.